Well, I did like the sounds of it, but I was disappointed.

I watched part of the first episode, but I turned it off in disgust about halfway through—about the time the one adult leader reappeared and took charge, telling the kids to organize into four groups, which they obediently did, even wearing colored bandanas to indicate which group they belonged to. Then he started to assign tasks to the kids, along with a schedule of rewards.

Phooey! It's just another stupid "reality" show, with precious little reality.

I was hoping for something like PBS' "Frontier House" with the work proportionately easier so that kids could cope with it. It looked like it was starting out that way: The buildings were already built so the kids didn't have to build them; they were given plenty of canned goods, and so on. They just had to get organized enough to cook and clean up after themselves. It should have been a manageable task, just challenging enough to make it interesting to see how they organized themselves. Would they operate as one big commune? Would they split into groups? Would some kids become outcasts? Would they own all the food in common, or divvy it up? How would they make decisions? Would they end up with a socialist or capitalist system, or something entirely different? Dictatorship, democracy, or anarchy?

But it looked like they weren't going to be allowed to figure that out for themselves. More's the pity.