recess guides you through this fall's hottest shows

What's more enjoyable than watching stranded adult contestants survive in the middle of Nowhere, USA? Watching preteens try to do the same thing. This is Kid Nation, where Survivor meets Lord of the Flies. It seems as if society is sick enough to recommend abducting 10 year olds from home and placing them thousands of miles from their family, just for the sake of entertainment. However disturbing the producers may be, audiences aren't complaining. The premise seems simple enough: assemble a group of eager and diverse eight to 15 year olds, place them in a ghost town called Bonanza City and watch them squirm. They cook their own food, run their own form of hierarchy and use outhouses. Oh, did I mention they kill livestock for dinner? Each week, there are new challenges and twists that the producers throw in and the kids work together as a little units to solve problems in a strangely democratic fashion. Even though the show is probably scripted and the contestants have an unrealistically precocious vocabulary-what kind of 10 year old uses the word disarray?-the show does have redeeming merits. Aside from the fact the children are really cute and it's entertaining to push them to their limits, Kid Nation proves to America that perhaps tweens are more capable-and complex-than we thought them to be. And unlike Lord of the Flies, these contestants seem to put others before themselves. now that's a first for reality television. Although no one is suggesting that children should be subjected to the horrors of Paris Hilton's The Simple Life anytime soon, it will definitely be interesting to see how much these kids can accomplish and withstand on their own. But it's likely that the warm fuzzy feelings will soon subside as the evil side of human nature rears its ugly head.