Smartest And Most Appalling TV Show Lists Have Surprisingly Few Crossovers

A 'Kid Nation' Reunion: What If The Theoretical Survivors Of Bonanza City Threw A Party?

On last week's season finale of Kid Nation, America mourned as CBS Bonanza City, the experimental, would-be utopia intended to serve as a model for reforming our utterly debased society, succumbed to anarchy, unspeakable violence, and the first televised act of child-on-child cannibalism in the history of the medium.

The 'Kid Nation' Ends In Ruin

It is with a heavy heart that we note Kid Nation, the bold experiment in utopia-building bravely undertaken by the finest societal engineers the world of network television has ever seen, ended in tragedy, heartache and utter failure. On last night's season finale, host Jonathan Karsh—whom, we feel obligated to point out, we always believed to be a minion of Satan himself sent to tempt the children with community-eroding worldly pleasures—cackled as the town's Job Board, the monument codifying the ever-shifting caste system that kept CBS Bonanza City from descending into total chaos, was consumed in flames, declaring—please brace yourselves—that there would be no more laws.

Then, disaster.

The 'Kid Nation' Finally Starts Addressing Its Taylor Problem

Having survived last week's bloody putsch that stripped her of a position on the Town Council but left five of her most loyal Yellow District adherents dead, deposed Kid Nation pageantator Taylor struggled to make the difficult adjustment to her lowered status within the CBS Bonanza City community during Wednesday night's new episode.

Revolution Comes To 'Kid Nation'

The 'Kid Nation' Faces Its Most Difficult Challenge To Date

In a sneak preview of tonight's installment of Kid Nation just leaked online, we learn that the citizens of CBS Bonanza City will finally abandon the preternatural maturity that has previously allowed them to choose sensible waste-elimination facilities over a television and soul-nurturing Bibles over a productivity-diminishing mini-golf course, opting for a communal reward too irresistible to pass up in favor of a more practical prize.

Citizens Of 'Kid Nation' Choose God Over Dinosaur Holes

While we've already paid one visit today to Kid Nation—by way of some exclusive Junior Miss cheesecake glamour shots of Taylor, or "Queen of the Yellow Hankies" as she insists her disciples refer to her— we thought we'd return once again to the outhouse-deficient Shangri-La, this time with clip in tow. In last night's stunning turn of events, the citizens of Bonanza City were again offered a choice as steeped in moral implication as the TVs vs. Poop-Shacks vote of the debut episode.

Addiction Threatens To Cripple 'Kid Nation'

While we never expected Kid Nation's pioneers to succumb to the siren song of virgin sasparilla this quickly, it was inevitable that residents of CBS Bonanza City would eventually turn to drink to blunt the pain of their workaday lives; after all, there are only so many filthy, overflowing outhouses a ten-year-old can scrub before she needs a little help forgetting she's trapped in the Laborer class for at least another week.

The Kid Nation Learns About Where Their McNuggets Come From, Theoretically

On last night's episode of Kid Nation, the pint-sized utopia-builders of CBS Bonanza City learned the sobering lesson that among the dozens of off-camera adults retained by the network so that their bold social experiment didn't quickly devolve into a prepubescent Jonestown (watch out for that Michael kid—the way that he can make the entire Nation applaud his every utterance is disquieting), not a single one was there to slaughter their chickens for them, requiring that at least one grade-schooler was going to get a crash course in the art of poultry butchering.

Hillary Locks Up Crucial Meathead Endorsement

· Rob Reiner officially endorses Hillary Clinton, immediately embracing her campaign's talking points on Barack Obama: "Based on the experience I have had in politics, and I have been on the front lines in a lot of these fights, I came around to realizing that we do need the most experienced and most qualified person to run the country." [Variety]
· The much-anticipated premiere-night Nielsen deathmatch between NBC's Bionic Woman remake and ABC's Grey's Anatomy spin-off is won by Bionic; meanwhile, Kid Nation dropped off from its unspectacular debut numbers of last week. [THR]
· Mark your calendars, Michael Bay fans, because giant fucking robots are coming again, eventually: Paramount and DreamWorks have staked out June 26th, 2009 for Transformers 2. And the project stays even if Spielberg and his pals go. [Variety]
· Bonnie Hunt is getting a daytime talk show. [THR]
· And on the development battlefront, NBC and ABC set up competing, Famesque projects about young people chasing their performing arts dreams in NY. [Variety]

The Sadder Side Of 'Kid Nation'

Despite how easy our earlier video of last night's eagerly anticipated Kid Nation premiere might have made life in CBS Bonanza City, NM seem, the children's new frontier existence is not all fun and choosing-whether-to-be-passively-entertained- or-poop-before-your-bowels-rupture games. Being separated from one's parents or pageant coaches for the first time can be an emotionally devastating experience that not every grade-school-age society-builder is equipped to handle, as you can clearly see above in the teary eyes of Jimmy and Taylor.

Kid Nation Contestants Face Life-Or-Death Dilemma In Premiere Episode

Even though the pre-release controversy surrounding Kid Nation, CBS's attempt to bring Lord of the Flies-style improvisational community-building to primetime television, seemed to indicate each episode would bring viewers harrowing footage of exhausted 10-year-olds mistakenly chugging bleach or sacrificing their weakest, most homesick citizens to a pack of ravenous coyotes for the good of an evolving society, the physical jeopardy in which the Nationeers were placed in last night's premiere exceeded anything we were prepared for.

Rat-Pack-Worshipping Brett Ratner Takes On Sinatra Project

· What showbiz name evokes Rat Pack-era Hollywood cool more than any other? That's right: Brett Ratner. The singularly hacky Rush Hour 3 director, continuing his ongoing mission to diminish the legacies of legends whose lifestyles he desperately wishes to emulate, will reteam with screechy muse Chris Tucker for an adaptation of Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, a tell-all bio about Sinatra's relationship with his valet. "I think [Ratner's] channeling Frank sometimes," says one the book's authors, rolling around in a pile of New Line's option cash. [Variety]
· Dan Rather opens a can containing $70 million worth of legal whoop-ass on CBS, claiming that the network scapegoated him for the Memogate scandal. [THR]
· DreamWorks Animation runs screaming from a May 2009 box office confrontation with James Cameron's Avatar, moving their Monsters Vs. Aliens to a safer Easter '09 release date. [Variety]
· Fox picks up Raffik, a police procedural about a Borat-like Albanian detective dispatched to the US Americas to amuse the LAPD with his observations about the differences in their law enforcement techniques. [THR]
· The premiere numbers for Kelsey Grammer's Back to You, Gordon "Scorched Bollocks" Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and the New Mexico Child Welfare Department's Kid Nation are uniformly "solid" but "unspectacular." Also, as expected, plenty of female teenagers watched Gossip Girl. [Variety]

CBS Flouts Child-Buzz-Building Laws With 'Kid Nation' Screenings

· CBS has quietly set up preview screenings of Kid Nation at elementary schools in major markets for students, parents, and teachers, where families can come together and discuss the exciting child-labor-law issues raised by the controversial new series, as well as receive assurances from the network that no children were eaten by bears during the show's production, even though that unlikely eventuality was covered by that now-infamous waiver. [Variety]
· HBO Films greenlights a feature version of Grey Gardens, the 1975 crazy-cat-lady documentary that has also recently spawned a crazy-cat-lady Broadway musical, and which will star Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. [THR]
· In an onscreen pairing that will result in a dramatic showdown between the dreamiest and the sleepiest sets of blue eyes in all of Young Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire are in negotiations to join Brothers, director Jim Sheridan's remake of a Danish-language war drama. Our prediction: after their first shared scene, Maguire locks himself in his trailer, ashamed that his orbs will never sparkle like Gyllenhaal's. [Variety]
· Star Trek's JJ Abrams chooses Zoe Saldana as the new Uhura. [THR]
· Huzzah! The Fall TV season is here! And while we didn't watch the solidly rated premiere of Fox's K-ville last night, it's nice to know that we have finally something to neglect besides shows about remembering karaoke lyrics. [Variety]

While we're sure the 22-page waiver (just posted on the Smoking Gun) the parents and guardians of Kid Nation participants had to sign prior to shipping off their children to 40 fun-filled days in a New Mexico ghost town is nothing more than a boilerplate document that could be used to indemnify the proprietors of any summer camp that intended to film its own amateur production of Lord of the Flies against nuisance lawsuits, scanning the litany of potential disasters lawyers could envision befalling the Nation stars still makes for a pretty good time.

A 'Kid Nation' Under Siege

People hysterical over the alleged child endangerment issues surrounding the production of Kid Nation—CBS's reality TV show/summer camp/Lord of the Flies hybrid where each episode ends with one child being giving a $20,000 gold star and another being devoured by his or her more socially manipulative castmates—persist in stirring up trouble for this Fall's upcoming breakout hit.

Critics Question Whether A 40-Day Stay At 'Kid Nation' Summer Camp Is Healthy For A Child's Emotional Development