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‘Kid Nation’ puts Hollywood labor tension into sharp focus - Los Angeles Times

For 40 days, the children of “Kid Nation” hauled wagons, cooked meals, managed stores and cleaned outhouses, all in the name of building a society in front of reality TV cameras.

Were they working? There doesn’t seem to be a simple answer. But what is clear is that CBS’ new reality venture, which placed 40 children on a New Mexico ranch without any contact with their parents, has become a flash point in a television genre actors and writers have long blamed for taking jobs from them.

I have heard from just about everyone I know about this show. It is pretty simple, if we don’t want shows like this the answer is not to watch them. The article above mentions a lawsuit one of the parents has brought. Now, the question has to be, why in the world was your child involved in the first place? I have three children and there is nothing in the world anyone could offer me that would put them away from me for 40 days for entertainment purposes. Of course they are working. The producers and parents can play with semantics as much as they want but they were working 14 hour days because that was the shooting schedule. That simply doesn’t matter to the network because they will still make money by the fistful. The only way to get them to stop is to refuse to watch it. There are hundreds of channels now and that is a viable option. You can always just turn it onto one of the discovery channels and of course there will be something good to watch. If you don’t hit the networks in the pocket this will never change. Their moral compass rises and falls with their stock prices.

Technorati Tags: reality tv, CBS, Kid Nation

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