Here's a blurb from a preview of Brat Camp:
The kids, strangers to one another as well as the counselors, are told by their parents that the camp is a one-week excursion - but it's actually a 40-day minimum stay, where they learn to survive under harsh outdoor conditions, and rely on one another, collaborate, open up and heal.
Here's the whole thing:
From Daily News Entertainment:
ABC's 'Brat' packs 'em off to camp
Nine unruly teens face an Outward Bound-type challenge on 'Brat Camp.'
BRAT CAMP
Wednesday night at 8, ABC.
The uncomfortable, unlikable part of "Brat Camp," ABC's newest reality series, comes early and often, with out-of-control kids acting up - with the emphasis on acting - for the network's reality-TV cameras.
They throw and slam things, curse and punch, and act rebelliously, all with the film crew so near by and obvious that you know it's not genuine behavior being recorded.
If you can forgive that and keep going, though, "Brat Camp" (Wednesday night at :cool: eventually finds its way and its heart.
By the time the two-hour premiere is over, this show about nine wayward youngsters, ages 14 to 17, finding their way has started to reward good behavior rather than bad, and present lessons arguably worth watching.
Essentially, "Brat Camp" is an unabashed recruitment ad for one extreme counseling institution: Oregon's SageWalk, where counselors adopting "earth names" like Mountain Wind and Glacier Mountain Wolf take a group of angry, rebellious teens into the wilderness.
The kids, strangers to one another as well as the counselors, are told by their parents that the camp is a one-week excursion - but it's actually a 40-day minimum stay, where they learn to survive under harsh outdoor conditions, and rely on one another, collaborate, open up and heal.
Whatever the hidden flaws in SageWalk, you won't find them in "Brat Camp," which sells this nonconsensual Outward Bound excursion as a Tough Love course of last resort.
The narrator delivers the sales pitch right from the start: The goal of the therapy program, which becomes the goal of the TV program as well, is to "turn these lost souls back into the sweet sons and daughters they once were before it's too late."
It's like "Scared Straight!" - with Oregon isolation replacing New Jersey prison walls - and the comparison to that landmark 1978 documentary couldn't be more apt. "Scared Straight!" - which took tough teens to prison to hear frightening stories of wasted lives behind bars from the inmates themselves, was the breakthrough project for producer-director Arnold Shapiro.
Shapiro is also behind "Brat Camp," and it's a return to form in more ways than one.
In recent years, Shapiro has been wasting his talents on "Big Brother," which he inherited after its initial season. But here, once he gets past the unfortunate salesmanship at the beginning, with all its attendant TV tantrums, "Brat Camp" more than justifies its existence.
There's an uneasy amount of exploitation, using young adults beneath the age of consent to provide reality-TV entertainment with their own personal demons and suffering. The deeper the kids get into the experience, though, the more they seem to forget the cameras, and drop their defenses, and learn to reevaluate their lives and direction.
"Dear Mom," one camper writes in the teaser to a later show, "I am changing. I can feel it deep in my soul."
Your opinion of "Brat Camp" will change as well - if you stick with it long enough. And you should.
Originally published on July 12, 2005
