Addiction Threatens To Cripple ‘Kid Nation’

While we never expected Kid Nation’s pioneers to succumb to the siren song of virgin sasparilla this quickly, it was inevitable that residents of CBS Bonanza City would eventually turn to drink to blunt the pain of their workaday lives; after all, there are only so many filthy, overflowing outhouses a ten-year-old can scrub before she needs a little help forgetting she’s trapped in the Labourer class for at least another week.Unafraid to expose the problems of the precociously dysfunctional community produced by their primetime social experiment, the network used last night’s episode to document the impact that nightly root-beer binges at the saloon (did Jonathan Karsh teach them how to make those car bombs?) have had on the Nation, a scourge that’s reduced the town to a bunch of oversleeping goldbrickers who can only be roused from their bunks by extreme measures. Accordingly, this week’s town meeting was an especially moving affair, with the gold star being awarded to the first child brave enough to stand before her peers and admit her powerlessness before her new, zero-proof master.

[Video montage compiled by Molly McAleer, God bless her soul]

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: The Kid Nation Learns About Where Their McNuggets Come From, Theoretically [Defamer]