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.
1. The kids were pushed to the brink right from the start.
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.
2. They were divided into haves and have-nots just for dramatic effect.
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 that had hard labor. Plus, they were all supposed to govern by town council representatives and compete for gold star trophies worth real money. So, basically, they had the class system, the representative government system, and capitalism in place by rule — that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for self-determination, does it?
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3. The camerapeople encouraged bad behavior.
One contestant who appeared on the show — the youngest of all, then eight years old, Jimmy Flynn — revealed that when the contestants would resort to infighting and even physical violence, the camera operators would smile to provide positive encouragement for those deeds. In one such instance, Jimmy was dragged by a lasso around his neck, and while he cried, not one but two sets of cameras documented every second of his agony.
4. They encouraged kids to kill a live chicken just because.
For sustenance, the children were provided with only canned goods and dried beans and had to learn how to prepare their own meals, even though most of them were barely in double digits of age. When they started to become hungry enough to eye the livestock on the ranch as potential meat, at least one contestant — Daniel “DK” Kyri — said he was told to encourage the slaughter session, which ultimately did happen.
5. Cooking caused at least one dangerous accident.
A girl named Divad would become known on the show as the “potato girl” for her love of the root veg, but she paid the price for her unfettered access to frying oil at least once. In a flashback, we see her getting her cheek burned by oil spatter at the age of 11 because there were no safety protocols in place to keep her safe from injury during her cooking adventures.
6. The bleach incident was completely avoidable.
Not only were the kids not prevented from hurting themselves, but in some cases they were surrounded by attractive nuisances. Case in point: DK, who was on saloon duty, went to go drink a bottle of yellow liquid with a citrus scent and soon was overcome with a choking, burning sensation. The bottle he was drinking had bleach in it, was unmarked, and was stored near the ordinary drinks.
Monty Brinton/CBS/Everett Collection
7. Investigative authorities were turned away from investigating the site.
New Mexico officials responded to an anonymous complaint about the conditions of the living quarters at the location, but they were turned away several times before abandoning their pursuit. Meanwhile, the town’s “trash pile” was becoming completely unsanitary, and the kids reported eating out of their hands for how dirty the dishes would become.
8. The producers encouraged mayhem to ramp up the tension.
In week six, which was the final week of production, the kids said they woke up to producers torching their job board and encouraging rule-less mayhem, which resulted in a wild run on the candy shop by all of the hungry children. When filming the fallout, they twisted the narrative and quoted one contestant, Olivia Cloer, to say they decided to run amok but omitted to air the part where she explained exactly why they did it.
9. The parents were in shock when they arrived for a final visit.
Cloer’s father, who also participated in the docuseries episode, revealed that Olivia and sister Mallory’s mother was a social worker and, when they arrived on the set to see where their children had been living for the last six weeks, found that they were all existing in a crisis. Indeed, each of the children who participated in the doc reported being forever changed by their experiences on the show — whether it was from bullying by kids at home or having to grow up and face certain hard realities way too soon, the show was “formative” for all of them, for better and for worse.
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