“Kid Nation,” meet “Baby Borrowers”

As we reported last week, advertisers saw an episode of “Kid Nation” last week, apparently didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it enough to buy lots of commercial time in it.

"A cautious approach from some advertisers to a show generating this much attention is very common,” some CBS mouthpiece told Advertising Age. “We believe that the issues raised about Kid Nation will be resolved when the viewing public sees the first episode on Sept. 19."

That sentiment was echoed by the show’s embattled executive producer, Tom Forman, as the network circles the wagons and says damn the torpedoes and takes the plunge and insists the show must go on and engages in other clichés.

“Everybody’s questions about the show will be answered when it airs,” Forman told the New York Times. Amazingly, they’re talking about a second edition – perhaps set in Mexico, where life is cheap and men die like dogs and yet more clichés occur. “Nothing is off the table,” Forman told the Times.

And since “Kid Nation” is working out so well for CBS image-wise, NBC has plunged into a reality show featuring babies!

“Baby Borrowers” feature teen couples considering becoming parents. For three days each, they’re charged with caring for an infant, a toddler, a pre-teen, a teen and then, just because it sounds kind of cruel, an old person. The show shot in Idaho, where child labor laws are so slack they've actually made it legal for children to get trapped in deep wells to perk up cable news coverage during slow news cycles.

Of course, the show’s producers insist that not only is there nothing wrong with such an arrangement, and that the show may be the finest contribution to the television arts since “Queen for a Day.”

"We take extreme care and caution," Richard McKerrow insisted to TV Week. "It's an incredibly safe environment. ... It's safer than [daycare]." Which is just what parents about to enter their kids in daycare want to hear, that some reality show is better for their children.

“Baby Borrowers” debuted in January in England, and lest you think all the hand-wringing here over “Kid Nation” is just the result of a nation of simpering Americans who put the safety of children ahead of the needs of TV executives to create groundbreaking entertainment, well, the British show didn’t go over any better initially, either.

To be fair, the real parents are monitoring what the faux parents do and can remove their child if they don’t like what they see, which happened once in the British series. (The parents probably just decided to try to hold out for more money for their impending infant star.)

And McKerrow hits us with the money quote: “For all those people who think, ‘Oh God, it's another terrible reality show,’ I'd say it's got soul to it. It's got a real emotional journey to it.”

Of course he’d say that. I’d say, “Oh God, it’s another terrible reality show.”