There’ve been a lot of edgy and even morally questionable reality shows to air throughout TV history, but perhaps the most obviously inadvisable was Kid Nation . The 2007 reality competition series brought 40 young children out to live together in a New Mexico ghost town, where they were expected to feed themselves for at least two meals a day, hold down jobs in socially striated positions, run a government, live in squalor and filth, and, well, entertain the masses all the while. And Tuesday’s (September 17) new edition of Dark Side of Reality TV brings back several of those contestants to break down some of the seedier behind-the-scenes details of this one-season blunder.
Here are nine of the most shocking revelations about Kid Nation , according to this docuseries episode. Almost as soon as they arrived at the Bonanza City location, the kids were given their first physical challenge: haul all of their food and supplies to the abandoned town in the middle of the desert heat. Even worse, once they arrived after such an ordeal, they were given paper-thin, dirty mattress pads to sleep on and little else.
Talk about a wake-up call. Though the ostensible mission of this show was to see whether children, left to their own devices, could create a better system of governance than their parents, they were given a framework that essentially decided the answer for them. They were split into four teams, with upper class society members who did little work and lower class districts .