The wheels on the bus went round and round and round and round, driving in circles though the desert outside Santa Fe. It was April 1, 2007, a bright, crisp morning and the first day of shooting for a new CBS reality show , Kid Nation. Thirty-six school-aged children from across the country were crammed onto an old school bus, backpacks on their laps. A small crew of cameramen, sound technicians, and producers crowded in the aisle, trying to get footage for the show’s opening scene.

As they drove past little other than shrubs, a few dilapidated barns, and dust clouds, the expressions on the kids’ faces ranged from bored to outright petrified. They would be without their parents for the duration of the forty-day shoot on a movie set in the desert. They would cook their own food, clean their own toilets—and establish and run their own government.

A bearded producer named Benny Reuven asked an eight-year-old from New Hampshire named Jimmy Flynn, a miniature Jack Black look-alike with bushy hair, apple cheeks, and a gap-toothed smile, what he would miss most about home. A cameraman leaned against a seat and focused his lens on the boy while a sound technician lowered a fuzzy boom mic over his head. Jimmy ignored the question. “I’m not going to be with my parents, there’s no adults, and I think I’m going to die out here because there’s nothing,” he said.

The kids hadn’t been permitted to introduce themselves until now. Although they’d been staying in an adobe-style hotel in Santa Fe for two days, the producers wanted to get the introductions on camera. As the bus drove around, the crew members went up and down the aisle, meeting our heroes.

There was terrified Jimmy, of course. Then there was Sophia Wise, a precocious ninth grader from Florida who was discovered through a summer academic program she’d attended at Emory University. She was nervous and excited at the same time—the kids would be out of school for six weeks and on national TV, both of which sounded cool to her. The crew met Jared Goldman, an awkward eleven-year-old Shakespeare fan from Georgia with rectangular glasses, a straw hat, and a bulky red puffer jacket. Greg Pheasant, a fifteen-year-old from Nevada whom the producers had found through the Reno rodeo, was the oldest kid on the show and towered over the others. During auditions, Greg, a glowering and confrontational teenager, had been caught smoking in the stairwell of a Los Angeles hotel, which the casting team considered an asset. ( I’m not going to tell his mom, a casting producer thought to herself. Let’s just see how this plays out. ) They needed someone who would read as a classic American bad boy, and he seemed like a good bet.

There were forty in total, the stars of what producers billed as a post–9/11, Bush-era social experiment: What would happen if a group of kids, freed from adult intervention, could start over and build a society from scratch? Could they create a more perfect world, a children’s utopia? Or would it be closer to Lord of the Flies ?

I first learned about Kid Nation in early 2024, as the United States careened toward the presidential election. I was surprised that I had never heard of it, since I was at prime reality-TV-viewing age when it ran in 2007. CBS, I figured, must have done a good job sweeping it under the rug after it aired to ceaseless controversy. I was even more surprised to learn that the show had developed a bizarre second life in the 2020s, as a new generation of viewers discovered it online and dissected it on sites like Reddit and YouTube. The contestants, now adults, became minor celebrities again. What was it about Kid Nation that appealed to Gen Z , and what did it say about our politics and society then and now? The best way to find out, I decided, was to track down the contestants as adults. What they told me about their forty days in the desert was the craziest part of all: A lot of them had the time of their lives.

It didn’t start out that way, though. The kids, dubbed “Pioneers” by the producers, were dropped at their destination: the side of a dirt road with no town in sight, just an old wagon with old-timey wooden wheels. They gathered around the show’s host, a dimpled guy in his thirties named Jonathan Karsh, who had a Nathan Fielder way about him. “Bonanza City is just a few miles . . . that way,” Karsh told the kids. He tried again: “Bonanza City is just a few miles that way.”

What was he doing? Olivia Cloer, a twelve-year-old from Indiana who years later would write a self-published memoir of her experiences on the show, quietly asked her eight-year-old sister, Mallory, “What’s wrong with him?” Mallory shook her head.

Karsh explained that the group would be led by four Pioneers picked by the producers who represented the group in age and geography. “They’re your town council. And I think I hear them coming right now. . . .” Karsh looked up at the vast blue sky, and the kids followed his gaze. There was nothing but a few spare clouds. He repeated, “I think I hear them coming right . . . now, ” followed by a third try.

Karsh adjusted his earpiece. “Did you get it?” he said.

The kids heard a low buzz in the distance, and out of the sky appeared a white military helicopter. It kicked up dust onto the Pioneers as it landed in a field of shrubs, and out emerged the four town-council members: Anjay Ajodha, age twelve, an earnest dweeb from Houston with glasses and a bowl cut; Laurel McGoff, a twelve-year-old from Medford, Massachusetts, with braces and blazing red hair; Taylor DuPriest, age ten, a south-Georgia beauty queen; and Mike Klinge, a wiry eleven-year-old from Washington State wearing a black cowboy hat and glasses.

“They’re in charge,” Karsh announced. “At least, for the time being.”

To understand how a show like Kid Nation could be not only produced but also considered such a good idea by the network that many involved hoped it might be the next Survivor, it’s important to remember what 2007 was actually like. Reality TV was king, George W. Bush was president, Facebook had barely left the Harvard campus, the iPhone existed but the average kid didn’t have one, and the term “helicopter parenting” hadn’t entered the popular lexicon yet. It was the tail end of an era when kids could be kids.

“We were definitely the last generation that were not accountable to our parents all the time and didn’t rely heavily on screens,” contestant Sophia Wise told me recently. “I don’t want to say we matured as a society, because that’s not necessarily true, but as our societal values palpably shifted, it became this bizarre thing that exists that people can’t imagine doing now.”

One of the producers, Tom Forman, later told Variety that he drew inspiration for the show from the strife of the Bush presidency and a nation riven by political, ideological, religious, and racial divisions. “If you took extraordinary kids and gave them the chance to rethink government or religion or education—these issues that plagued us then and today—what would they come up with if unencumbered by our legacy issues as adults?” Depending on how one looked at it, Kid Nation was either deeply cynical ( think of the ratings! ) or notably optimistic. In 2024, although the generation of Kid Nation kids were grown-ups now, real participants in actual society, it was impossible not to notice that we’d hardly left any of those “legacy issues” of twenty years ago in the dust.

The seed of Kid Nation came from Ghen Maynard, a veteran reality-TV executive who had recently returned to CBS for his second stint at the network after a period with NBC. Maynard had studied social psychology at Harvard and had long pondered an idea for a reality show about kids. He remembered watching studies in college that demonstrated how very young children, when they took a fall or hurt themselves with no adults around, were far less likely to cry. When adults were around—waterworks. He wanted to create a show that explored that idea, that children were more capable than we think when they’re not constantly coddled and protected.

He had developed hits including Big Brother, America’s Next Top Model, The Amazing Race, and, notably, Survivor, a ratings juggernaut that completed its twelfth season in early 2006. But CBS could’ve used a new hit, and Ghen Maynard was tasked with finding one. Maynard had inherited a deal with Tom Forman, who had won back-to-back Emmys for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and shared Maynard’s sense that the reality genre had grown stale. Forman had been a producer on the CBS News documentary 9/11, which had aired just six months after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Following a two-minute in-person pitch from Maynard, Les Moonves, CBS’s chief executive at the time, green-lit the show. Kid Nation was a go.

The place? A “ghost town”: Bonanza Creek Movie Ranch in New Mexico, where movies like Silverado, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and 3:10 to Yuma were filmed. (More recently, it was the site of the fatal Rust shooting.) It was chosen for both its philosophical resonance—adults couldn’t make the town work, but maybe kids could—and its practicality. At the time, New Mexico had less stringent regulations concerning the use of child actors than states like California and New York.

The cast? Forty kids, ages eight to fifteen, from all walks of American life: urban, rural, rich, poor. Casting director Lynne Spillman, who had worked on Survivor and The Amazing Race, targeted the rodeo circuit, gifted-and-talented programs, beauty pageants, and theater camps, looking for the right mix. The team found Anjay, one of the town-council members who emerged from the helicopter, at the Scripps National Spelling Bee .

Anjay’s audition process was typical. While driving home from his grandmother’s place near Houston, his parents told him a production company had called. Something about a reality show. Anjay thought they were joking until they played the message for him. His parents were skeptical, but he begged them to let him try out. He was a spelling-bee nerd, and for once he wanted to be the cool kid on TV. “Mom, Dad, please. Come on. I think I can be good at this,” he pleaded. With some grumbling, they headed to Dallas for a screen test.

The final round of interviews came three months later, in Los Angeles. CBS put up Anjay and his family in a hotel room along with the other recruits. He was instructed not to talk to them, which he found weird, because they all hung around the pool during the day, trying to avoid eye contact. He was given a three-hundred-page psychological evaluation: Do you hear voices? Do you do your homework never, sometimes, or always? He met the producers in the presidential suite of the hotel. They asked if he liked camping, what he thought about infrastructure and health care and politics. Are you okay with being around animals? Are you okay with running and jumping?

Anjay’s parents signed a twenty-two-page liability waiver, filled with legalese. The contract stipulated that the kids of Kid Nation were not being hired to work. Instead, they would be given a “stipend” of $5,000. The waiver protected the network and producers if a child were to contract an STD, get pregnant, or encounter wild animals. If the parents violated a nondisclosure agreement, they would be subject to $5 million in damages. Anjay’s parents signed away any rights to sue the production company or network if he was exposed to “unmarked and uncontrolled hazards and conditions that may cause the minor serious bodily injury, illness or death.”

Smash cut to April 1, 2007. Jonathan Karsh, the Nathan Fielder–like host, pointed to a barbed-wire fence with wooden posts. He repeated versions of the line “Well, Bonanza City is just a few miles down that fence line” about a half-dozen times for the cameras. Then he pointed toward the wagons behind him, loaded with supplies. “You guys are going to grab a wagon and get started. It’s a long hike.”

Laurel, the redheaded town-council member from Massachusetts, made a sign of the cross.

The Pioneers were off, tossing their belongings into the back of the carts. Jimmy, the eight-year-old afraid for his life, chased a stray goat. Progress was slow; the dirt road was filled with potholes. In all the commotion, Anjay forgot to drink water, and soon he was dehydrated and flagging. One wagon tipped backward, dropping its supplies. Kids bickered about who was doing their fair share of work. DK Simmons, a fourteen-year-old theater kid from Chicago, crumpled and moaned, claiming he was experiencing leg cramps. The producers stopped the caravan several times to reshoot.

Bonanza City was not much more than a handful of crisscrossing dirt roads and a few empty wooden structures. The bunkhouses were dusty and uninsulated, with nothing more to sleep on than striped mattresses, about an inch thick. There was a single outhouse for the entire cast.

As the Pioneers explored, Anjay helped unload a cart of food supplies into the building that housed the kitchen. It included a wood-burning stove and rudimentary cooking equipment. The council members and some other kids gathered around a book with basic recipes and instructions for using the stove. “Rock candy? Let’s make that,” Anjay suggested.

A group of would-be chefs managed to light a fire in the stove to whip up macaroni for forty, slowing down the process considerably by dumping a massive amount of dried noodles into still-cold water. Sophia looked on in disbelief. She leaned over the shoulders of the younger girls making the pasta. “You have to put it in when the water’s boiling. Way too much pasta, too.” She took charge, barking orders. “We are not going to starve out here.”

After a dinner of mushy mac and cheese and a scoop of beans for everyone, the Pioneers set off to bed. Anjay was feeling the effects of dehydration. He had vomited earlier, and the medical team tended to him, giving him Gatorade and rehydration packets. “Sleep it off,” one of them said. Anjay found a spot on the floor of a bunk and slept for the next twelve hours.

Outside one of the girls’ bunkhouses, Taylor, the beauty queen, told Laurel through sobs that she missed her own bed and “getting to eat protein.”

Although the group’s arrival in Bonanza City had resulted in pandemonium, the chaos wouldn’t last. The desolation was a bit of a mirage as well. After all, it was CBS, and they were children. Parents were barred from the set and the kids would make their own decisions, but they would be surrounded by adults at virtually all times, roughly two hundred in total, including the camera crew, producers, child psychologists, the medical team, and junior casting producers—nicknamed Caps—who would sleep in closet-like rooms next to the kids’ bunks and be available around the clock.

For all the talk of allowing kids to create their own society, this was still TV, and it needed some structure. Kid Nation would shoot in a three-day-per-episode cycle: The first day followed the kids as they functioned in the town, the second was a “showdown”—a challenge created by a producer who had done the same on Survivor —and the third was the town-hall meeting, for open discussion and, one hoped, a little drama.

The producers gave the kids something they called the Pioneer Journal, which they kept in a chapel on the edge of town. It was purportedly written in 1885 by the “original” pioneers of the “ghost town”—a group whose writing style sounded remarkably like that of mid-2000s reality-TV producers. On the morning of the first full day, Anjay and the other council members consulted the journal. “Here’s my advice,” it read. “Organize your town.” It suggested that the town be divided into four districts that would live and work together. Each district would have a color—blue, red, yellow, and green. And so it was.

Karsh provided a narrative structure as well. He was a strange choice to host Kid Nation —in fact, he was a last-minute replacement. He was a producer on the show with a background in documentary filmmaking; his feature doc My Flesh and Blood, about a family with eleven adopted special-needs children, won awards at Sundance. CBS had almost penned an unlikely deal with the comedian Tom Green, and Iron Chef America ’s Alton Brown was also in the mix. But when those two fell through, they turned to Karsh, who had been a stand-in host during planning stages.

“Pioneer living is tough, isn’t it?” he said to the kids on the first morning. “Maybe it’s time to get a little bit more organized.” He would go on to describe a rotating job board, a currency of “Buffalo nickels,” a system that divided the four districts into a class system, and the way the showdowns would work.

Karsh came to every town-hall meeting. During the first one, he told the Pioneers that each week the council would award one of them a gold star worth $20,000, which added a game-show element as well as an incentive for hard work, good behavior—and self-interest. He also offered the kids a chance to leave. “Does anybody want to go home?” Karsh asked the group. “This decision is irreversible . . . so I hope you really mean it.”

On the fourth day of filming, Taylor answered this question by shaking her head no—she was staying. But poor, terrified Jimmy couldn’t take it. “I’m really homesick,” he said. “I think I’m way too young for this.”

Seventeen years later, Anjay told me that before he left for New Mexico, he and his parents had come up with a code in case he wanted out. The production team provided status updates to parents over the phone every three days, and Anjay’s family decided that if anything went dramatically wrong, he just needed to have a producer ask his parents about tornadoes or “unit six” of his homework. They also gave him a map of the area and prepaid calling cards so he could get to the nearest town and call them.

One of the producers, Emily Sinclair, who was known as the “kid whisperer” for her natural way with children, conducted interviews with the group for twelve hours a day. With Sinclair, they could let their emotions out, and many of them cried.

Anjay didn’t end up feeling the need to run away, but the show did turn out to be grueling. A typically dramatic moment on the show went something like this: On day five, the Pioneers killed chickens. They were already tired of baked beans and canned apples and peaches. (“We need protein!” DK said.) Greg, the bad boy, shared that he’d worked for a butcher and volunteered to do the dirty work, over the tearful objections of the youngest girls in particular. The town voted to kill the chickens. Cheers rang through the mess hall. As soon as the vote concluded, Emilie—a nine-year-old from Nevada—and two other kids ran to the chicken coop. “The plan is to lock ourselves in the chicken coop until they say, ‘No, we’re not going to kill chickens,’ ” she told a cameraman. One of the other girls said, “Are they going to hang them like they did Saddam Hussein?”

They were overruled. Dinner would be chicken stew. The group gathered around a tree stump. Greg held a black chicken against the ground. “You gotta stretch the neck out,” he said confidently as the bird screeched.

There was an adult there, but years later, no one can say who. They helped guide Greg through the procedure. The teen lifted the ax. Whack. Emilie screamed. The chicken’s headless body flopped around on the ground. Emilie ran away and Greg killed the second chicken.

As the days wore on, the kids grew filthy and tired. They’d been instructed not to bring dental care, so they couldn’t even brush their teeth until they eventually won supplies as a prize. For some, it was all exciting stuff. But two other contestants followed Jimmy off the show, and at least one stayed because he had no other choice.

One day a producer came across a kid crying alone. He asked what was wrong.

“My parents, they do this every year,” the boy said, weeping. “They send me to summer camp, and I hate these things, because I know that I’m different and I accept that I’m different. No kid is going to want to be with me, and I’m stuck here.”

“Do you want to go home?” the producer asked.

“Well, my parents aren’t home. They’re in Europe now.”

During their downtime off camera, the kids played, slept, and read. They gossiped and developed crushes. (Laurel had her first kiss during the show.) They stole snacks from the crew. They relentlessly teased the host behind his back for the multiple takes he had to do for the cameras— Bonanza City is just a few miles that way! —and, mostly, they hung out in the saloon. One thing they didn’t do was homework: Although the kids were pulled out of school for six weeks, there were no studio-provided teachers on set.

Because the weather was so unpredictable—one day it snowed and other days reached 80 degrees—and the saloon’s walls had the fewest cracks, it became a place where the kids gathered to keep warm and socialize. Their drink of choice was the Bonanza Bomb. Like its namesake, the Jägerbomb, it involved dropping a shot of flavoring into a glass of soda and guzzling it.

It would be a stretch to say that the kids faced no real danger. DK, the drama kid, accidentally drank bleach when he unintentionally used it as the shooter in his Bonanza Bomb. Sophia later heard that in his distress DK started singing “Amazing Grace,” which she thought was very on-brand for him. He was treated by the medical team and made a full recovery. Several kids got sick to the point of vomiting due to altitude sickness. A crew member was fired for doing doughnuts with Sophia on the back of his ATV. Divad Miles, an eleven-year-old from Fayetteville, Georgia, burned her face with a grease splatter while cooking, and another Pioneer reportedly suffered a stress fracture in her thumb.

Greg, the kid who killed the chickens, bullied other contestants. Some younger kids said they saw him poke his finger through his pant fly as if it were a penis and dangle it in front of them. (Producers say they were informed of his behavior and warned him that it needed to stop, but he was never removed from the show.)

Then Greg peed in a canteen belonging to a boy named Nathan. Production found out about it, but he denied doing it, so they threatened to take a urine sample and compare it to a sample from the canteen. The crew gave him an out that would move the plot forward: Nominate Nathan for a coveted gold star and they’d let the whole thing slide. “Done deal,” Greg agreed.

Later, in their bunk before bedtime, Greg apologized to Nathan. The camera crew asked him to do it again so that they could get it on film.

In one of the lasting ironies of Kid Nation, despite the producers’ promise of allowing the kids to create their own society, Bonanza City had become a microcosm of the country—a capitalist society with divisions along religious, class, and political lines, all of which were created and fueled by the adults running the show. (It was reality TV, after all.) And just like in the world of adults, the introduction of politics and religion tore Bonanza City apart.

The announcement came from Karsh: The group would vote for a new town council. They could choose to keep the existing members, or they could run against them. Olivia decided to run against Anjay, accusing him of being a poor leader for their district. Taylor was challenged by a ten-year-old from Florida, Zach Kosnitzky; Mike by Guylan Qudsieh, an eleven-year-old from Upton, Massachusetts; and Laurel ran unopposed.

During the campaign, rivals ripped up Taylor’s campaign posters, leading to a tearful confrontation.

On the morning of the thirty-eighth day in Bonanza City, Mike went out for a walk at dawn, reflecting on the good times to a camera, when he came upon the job board engulfed in flames. “Oh my God!” he screamed, running back to the bunks. “The job board is on fire!”

The board collapsed into a charred wooden skeleton. It was a symbolic moment. No more jobs. No more work. Their time in Bonanza City was nearly over. The kids celebrated by raiding the candy store in an incident they later dubbed “the candy riot.”

It took almost no time after shooting wrapped for the controversy to begin. Within days, an anonymous letter was sent to the New Mexico governor’s office and the Santa Fe county sheriff reporting the bleach-drinking incident and other episodes that the letter writer alleged were harmful. Janis Miles, the mother of Divad, who had burned herself with oil, sent a different letter to Georgia officials three weeks later saying the production bordered on abuse and neglect. She requested an investigation. (Santa Fe officials looked into her complaint and claimed to have found no wrongdoing.) According to a 2007 New York Times article, a New Mexico official conceded that the show almost certainly violated state laws requiring facilities that house children to be reviewed and licensed. The state reopened the investigation to look for child-labor and child-welfare violations but ultimately dropped the case without charges.

AFTRA, the performers union, questioned how much autonomy the kids had and how much they were instructed or directed by the production. There were concerns that the show was skirting child-labor laws and underpaying the kids and their families by describing the show as a camp instead of work. Ghen Maynard believed the backlash was overblown. No one had been seriously injured. The bleach DK drank, he claimed, was the equivalent of consuming a mouthful of pool water. Some producers suspected parents of being angry not because their kids got hurt but because they didn’t get enough airtime.

Around 9.4 million viewers tuned in for the premiere of Kid Nation. (By comparison, episode 1 of Survivor: China, which aired that September, drew 15.12 million viewers.) Because of the controversy, advertisers had largely abandoned the show before it aired. Critics were brutal. “There is just something grotesque and creepy about seeing children being displayed on reality TV, a genre that we all know thrives on conflict, tears, humiliation, and exhibitionism,” a Boston Globe review read. Despite the disappointment, there were plans for a season 2. Producers solicited applications and scouted locations. There was talk of a castle in Scotland as a setting.

When Anjay returned home, he was legally barred from telling his friends where he had been until Kid Nation aired. For him, being on the show was about proving that he could be a leader. He was always the tiny kid and the nerdy kid. But there he was on TV, leading other kids, doing the best he could for people he’d been in charge of in the midst of obstacles. He was proud of himself.

Others had a harder landing. Sophia found, after the show aired, that she was a celebrity at her school and was recognized whenever she went to Costco with her parents. She appeared on Ellen. She grew accustomed to a certain amount of adoration for simply being herself, and it hurt when, a few months later, that started to fade. It would happen once a month, then a few times a year, and finally once every few years.

She thought about acting. Sometimes she would get asked to audition because a producer wanted a “Sophia-like character.” When she didn’t get the parts, realizing she wasn’t Sophia enough for the Sophia part, she got discouraged.

Olivia came off as a bully for challenging Anjay during the election, and when her family watched the show, her parents were upset with her behavior until she explained that the footage used was often taken out of context or misleading. It was ironic, she believed, to be portrayed as a bully when she herself had been bullied before the show, she later said in a podcast interview. (After the show, Olivia, who couldn’t be reached for this story, apologized to Anjay; the two became friends, and he even wrote the foreword to her book.)

Greg and Taylor served as the series’ main antagonists, and some contestants later heard through the grapevine that Taylor was getting bullied after Kid Nation aired. (Neither Greg nor Taylor responded to interview requests for this article. The only interview I found with Greg was one he did with a YouTuber named Eric Barber in 2020. When he described the canteen incident, which never aired, he expressed some regret for his actions on the show. “I was definitely sorry for pissing in his canteen,” he said.)

And then, after the show’s thirteen episodes aired and season 2 was scrapped, Kid Nation was largely forgotten.

That was until 2020, when something strange happened: Kid Nation became a cult online hit with an entirely new generation of viewers. The comedy studio Funny or Die launched a YouTube series called “Was Kid Nation the Worst Reality Show Ever Made?” on which the hosts binged the show and narrated the episodes with snarky commentary.

Reddit communities developed that were dedicated to Kid Nation . Fan podcasts were produced, and popular YouTubers interviewed the now-adult cast. Some of the contestants gained large social-media followings. The show wasn’t available through CBS, so fans uploaded the entire series to YouTube and, after it was removed, to Vimeo. Online stories were published with updates on the contestants’ lives. Jared was found selling leftover “Bonanza 2007” necklaces on eBay, and fans were relieved when rumors that he had died proved to be untrue.

It made a certain amount of sense to the Pioneers themselves. Sophia, who now lives in Washington, D. C., feels it might be the innate weirdness of the show that attracted a new generation of viewers. But she also believes that the show’s central question—could kids thrive in a society of their own making?—is still on Americans’ minds. “I think people project stupidity onto kids that isn’t there, or lack of understanding, and that was a conclusion that I came to while being on the show—that I think kids are largely underestimated and their opinions are undervalued.”

For all the criticisms of the show, at least some of the Kid Nation kids remember it as a highlight of their life. “I truly look back on it as the best thing that ever happened to me, as crazy as that sounds,” says Laurel, the district leader, who is now a teacher in Boston. Maynard watched the show Chicago Fire for years before he realized that one of its main characters, an emotional linchpin of the series, was played by an actor named Daniel Kyri—aka DK Simmons, the “drama king” who drank the bleach. He had graduated from Kid Nation to find success as an actor.

When the show got its second life in 2020, Anjay, who now works as a technical program manager at Docusign, suddenly found himself becoming the center of attention, thirteen years after it wrapped. Friends asked him to recount the story of Kid Nation over drinks at bars, and he was approached regularly for interviews.

Today, he has questions about the ethics of a reality show focused on children and cast with familiar archetypes—heroes and villains, nerds and bullies, spoiled brats and troublemakers. He remembers how producers created storylines to foster conflict and, as an adult, is astounded. But to him, it captured the zeitgeist of 2007. Anjay thinks of Greg, for example, as living up to the expectations of teenage boys at the time; many of his actions would have been considered merely “locker-room behavior” back then, even if these days they would be viewed quite differently.

Still, Anjay has fond memories of the show. He once brought a date to his apartment, where he had a poster for Kid Nation that his dad had framed hanging on his wall.

“Why do you have a Kid Nation poster on the wall?” she asked.

“Well, that’s me right there.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe this,” the date said. “I auditioned for the second season!”

He hadn’t thought much about the show until then. Anjay did some searching online and found Kid Nation episodes, which he watched for the first time in years.

When he came to the chicken-slaughter episode, he couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of a warning placed at the bottom of the screen, just before Greg wielded the ax: Caution: The following scene may be intense for young children.