Episode 2 of “Kid Nation” lived up to expectations, despite the weird reverse-arc of opening with chicken-decapitationg and ending with a minor town hall scuffle, but as much as this adorable program has won over my unconditional affection, its most glaring flaw was extremely evident last night: Who the hell let frickin’ Macgyver on the show??
Greg, the 15-year-old, tossle-capped alpha male who will have an acoustic guitar prominently displayed in his dorm room three minutes after he arrives at college, is a total anarchy-preventing buzzkill who’s totally peeing on the word “Kid” in “Kid Nation.”
This week, when the kids were faced with the dilemma of killing a chicken, but couldn’t fathom the first step towards actually making it edible, Frontier Greg chimed in that he worked with a butcher for a year, then proceeded to slaughter the chickens, place them in water to make the feathers easier to remove, pluck the chickens, strip them, gut them, and cut them up into cookable pieces. Greg reared his superhuman maturity again during the pipe-laying challenge, noting that his dad taught him how to lay a sprinkler system and proceeding to deftly complete the challenge light years ahead of the other teams.
First off, what the hell kid acquires this many useful skills by the time they’re a sophomore in high school? I bussed tables in my dad’s restaurant when I was fourteen and thought I was the adultiest kid that ever lived, but I would’ve been useless in Bonanza City, unless there was a table-clearing or a napkin-folding competition, or if they needed someone to quote “Bill and Ted’s” in its entirety, or if they needed someone to enter the Konami code really fast. Otherwise, I’m spending the whole challenge talking about how awesome Black Sabbath is and repeating “everyone realizes we’re ‘laying pipe,’ right? Hehehehe.”
Second, why did the producers allow this superkid onto the show? All the promotions, hype, and allure of “Kid Nation” surrounded the idea of actual children trying to somehow hold a town together and accomplish manual tasks usually relegated to adults, not to see if Penny from “Inspector Gadget” can use her computer book to solve every problem swiftly and painlessly, thus preventing the exact “Lord of the Flies” caliber anarchy that we’re tuning in for? I’m not tuning in to see “Kids With More Useful Life Skills Than Most Adults Nation,” and not just because that title is long and inconvenient; I want to see kids crying, arguing, failing at everything, and ultimately and adorably triumphing.
After five episodes of tribal anarchy, of course.
