After all the controversy and news articles, Kid Nation premiered Wednesday night on CBS. Forty children between the ages of 8 and 15 were put in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days, and thus the news stories began. After rumors of lawsuits and complaints from parents, CBS kept Kid Nation under wraps for the early fall premiere. The network didn’t even send out media copies of the first episode, which featured the first four days’ of life in Kid Nation. But is Kid Nation really reality? Adult host Jonathon Karsh is onscreen a great deal of the time, and the kids obviously got a lot of suggestions from show insiders. Arranged into classes, the kids performed stunts to win privileges and prizes, and made a surprisingly smart decision when faced with having either a TV or seven new outhouses. Despite the young breakout stars of the series, the bottom line still remains: it’s TV, and beyond that it’s reality TV. There’s a whole lot of adult supervision and suggestion going on behind the scenes, no matter what CBS editing would have us believe.