After all the hype, Kid Nation has begun. The premise, in case you missed it, is a tamed version of Lord of the Flies where they put a bunch of kids (I lost track of how many) in an isolated setting (a ghost town) and let them run it for themselves, with no adults. Now, of course we know that there are adult cameramen and adult producers swarming around the place. The point is that if the kids are about to do something stupid like screw up the spaghetti, they can't look at the nearest adult and say, "Help?"
So what did you think? I found it hard to understand the kids, what with all the "like this and like that" and the general inability to properly pronounce most words. Not to mention that everything is "awesome." They fight like you'd expect, and the bigger kids (who are 15) pick on the smaller kids. Funny moment of the show comes when they get a private camera on the older kid after a fight who says, in all seriousness, "I didn't get upset….you haven't seen me upset yet." Dude, you're 15, nobody cares what you're like when you're upset.
They're trying to put some structure on it, with four teams divided up into things like running the store, handling the kitchen and so on. Those tasks are divided up based on a challenge, which also dictates how much money the kids make. That could be a problem since the losing team gets ten cents a day and the winning team gets a dollar. That's quite a gap, especially if one team loses several challenges.
In general it wasn't painful to watch. I'll watch it again, but I bet I won't stick through it to the end.