Top ten smartest shows of all time (in no particular order):

1. M*A*S*H
2. Cosmos (with Carl Sagan)
3. CSI
4. House
5. West Wing
6. Boston Legal
7. All in the Family
8. Frasier
9. Mad About You
10. Jeopardy

Your thirst for lists of TV shows grouped by virtue not fully quenched? For a nice contrast, we refer you now to EW's 20 Most Appalling TV Shows Ever. Admittedly the task was an easier one, but, in our estimation, their curatorship of the greatest armageddon-hastening popular entertainments proved far more successful than its four-eyed counterpart. That is, with the exception of #3, Kid Nation. They dismiss the CBS reality experiment as child exploitation, but fans know it was so much more: Nothing less than the birth of the next metropolis, grown from virtually nothing into greatness by fearless leader Jared's brilliant manipulation of a saltwater-taffy-based economy. The full Appalling list follows:

Moment of Truth
Jail
Kid Nation
Britney and Kevin: Chaotic / Hey Paula!
The Anna Nicole Smith Show
The Swan / I Want a Famous Face
Temptation Island
Cheaters
Flavor of Love, Flavor of Love 2, Flavor of Love 3, I Love New York, and I Love New York 2
Keeping Up With the Kardashians / The Bad Girls Club
Shows centered around the concept of ''millionaires''
Wife Swap / Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy
Chains of Love
Big Brother / The Real World
The Simple Life
My Super Sweet 16
MTV's Entire Programming Slate
The Littlest Groom / Age of Love
The Bachelor
The Jerry Springer Show

• Exclusive: MENSA Chair Picks The 10 Smartest TV Shows Of All Time [Fancast]
• 20 Most Appalling TV Shows Ever [EW]

We still haven't fully recovered from the emotional devastation of watching helplessly as the kids' primetime community failed, but this video, alleging to show scenes of a Nation reunion, does makes us feel a bit better; even though we're well aware that there were no survivors after the network detonated a small atomic bomb in the town square in an effort to erase their God-playing mistakes, we're nonetheless touched that CBS bothered to pre-shoot such a happy epilogue to the tragic series in case things didn't go as planned, allowing us to pretend—however briefly—that the Great Candy Riot of 2007 never happened.

• Kid Nation Reunion! [YouTube]
• Previously: The 'Kid Nation' Ends In Ruin [Defamer]

Then, disaster.

In what will become known as the Great Candy Riot of 2007, the town's citizens, liberated from the powerful fear of reprisal that kept them from indulging their every antisocial desire, descended upon Bonaza City's confectionary, swallowing every gobstopper, licorice whip, and Sour Patch Kid their rapidly distending bellies could handle while the slow-witted, not realizing currency was now completely useless, wasted valuable time looting buffalo nickels from the store's till. And in the most grisly turn of events, pageant queen Taylor—long a divisive force in the community—was dipped in molten fudge and devoured by the now-former members of the Town Council, their delicious revenge for her incurable indolence. It was this surprisingly unsatisfying, long-promised scene of cannibalism that served as the series' coda; the freeze-frame of the eerily charismatic Michael's chocolate-smeared face, upon which the epitaph "RIP Bonanza City: September 19-December 12, 2007" briefly flickered, will haunt us forever.

Or, we hope, until a new Nation rises again next year.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: The 'Kid Nation' Finally Starts Addressing Its Taylor Problem [Defamer]

Reduced by the charismatic Zach's revolución to the protection of a single toady, she was very nearly compelled to perform the manual labor she's been lovingly reared to abhor—Little Miss Georgia Cotton Queen 2006's responsibilities do not, she will happily remind you, include shoveling the fecal matter of lesser-bred children—but did, however, finally marshal the strength of privileged will to perform one last act of protest: dumping out the water buckets she'd been commanded to fill as punishment for her indolence. Unfortunately, that dramatic moral victory would be short-lived: if she didn't realize that she'd have to start pulling her weight the moment that host Jonathan Karsh revealed that this week's choice of community-improving rewards would be between an unlimited supply of fresh produce and "a gallows from which you can hang any lazy kid of your choosing from the neck until Taylor—I mean he or she!—is dead," she surely knew that her carefree days of sipping root beer while others scrubbed dirty pots were over when it took her peers a full ten minutes to reach a decision.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: Revolution Comes To 'Kid Nation' [Defamer]

Instead, we were treated to CBS Bonanza City's first Town Council elections, during which the Reign of Taylor, the incompetent period of governance that led to the diminishment of the Yellow District's reputation within the Nation, was finally brought to a close. Mercifully, new Fearless Yellow Leader Zach convinced the rest of the reconstituted Council to forgo the planned execution of the ousted Taylor, instead sentencing the haughty pageant queen to a week of scrubbing pots caked with the baked-in residue of their poorly prepared mac-and-cheese rations.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: The 'Kid Nation' Faces Its Most Difficult Challenge To Date [Defamer]

If you were upset by the town's debauched evening of root-beer car bombs, we think you're going to have a hard time coming to terms with the disturbing aftermath of the Jesus Juice party thrown by the Nation's surprise guest host.

• Kid Nation Shocker! [YouTube]
• Previously: Citizens Of 'Kid Nation' Choose God Over Dinosaur Holes [Defamer]

Would they choose a miniature golf course, and all the windmill-spinning frivolity that implies, or a library stocked exclusively with sacred religious texts? Considering the amount of root-beer drunks that populate the frontier town, we think the number of arms that shoot up in the air for the latter option might very well surprise you—less so, perhaps, when you realize that a Nation producer was just out of camera range, administering painful electric shocks through the computerized surveillance chips surgically implanted into every contestant's spine before shooting began.

• Kid Nation

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]

After a brief protest instigated by a PETA-supplied mole fizzled, the kids got to a-choppin', and delicious, protein-rich chicken dinners were consumed. But most crucially, the producers have cleverly prepared their TV audience for the shocking community beheadings they've planned for sweeps.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: The Sadder Side Of 'Kid Nation' [Defamer]

But just as the show's thoughtful producers gave the kids an expedient way to correct their town's artificial outhouse shortage, they also provided the homesick a painless way to opt out of their incredible adventure. Any child wanting to be immediately reunited with his family merely had to raise his hand in front of an assembly of the entire Bonanza community, then answer affirmatively to the following question by host Jonathan Karsh: "Now are you sure you want to go home and risk having your 39 best friends call you a whiny little quitter behind your back, even though right now they're all pretending to understand your decision? 'Yes,' you still want to go, or 'yes,' you want to stay? Did I mention that if you stick around, you might be able to win a solid gold star you can sell to pay for up to one semester at a private university years from now, or to buy 400 X-Box games in a few weeks? I did? What about the pony rides tomorrow, which is supposed to be a big secret? Oh. So you still want to go? OK, then, fucking—oops, language!—fricking go. The Nation will live on without you, I promise you that."

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: Kid Nation Contestants Face Life-Or-Death Dilemma In Premiere Episode [Defamer]

We refer, of course, to Bonanza City's 40:1 child-to-outhouse ratio, an utterly abusive dearth of civilized waste-elimination options that could stunt the healthy gastrointestinal development of the town's prepubescent populace. To their credit, however, the show's producers cleverly devised a way to remedy that imbalance, knowing that even the most willfully constipated, ADD-addled of contestants wouldn't be able to convince his peers choose a single idiot box over seven new shitters so that he could stay current on Hannah Montana.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: Waiver Lists All The Terrible Things That Could Possibly Happen To A 'Kids Nation' Contestant [Defamer]

In addition to the staggering variety of mishaps (listed above) that could occur on fun day trips to "inherently dangerous travel areas," the embattled production also wisely choose to protect itself against the unpredictable aftermath (STDs, pregnancy, HIV, etc) of verboten intimate relationships that might develop between the show's 8-to-15-year-olds after tossing back too many judgment-impairing drinks at their community's root beer saloon.

• No Human Rights In "Kid Nation" [TSG]

In this MSNBC clip, OK! magazine's Child Welfare Correspondent briefly discusses the controversy, noting an on-set accident in which a contestant was burned while cooking. (Do these media nannies think that delicious bacon was going to fry itself? And good thing no one told them about the bleach-in-the-coke-bottle thing.) But perhaps the most misguided of the accusations of neglect raised is that the children weren't going to school during the 40-day shoot; when the show finally airs and the public gets to see the poignant scene in which the first kid to suggest daily math class is placed in the stocks in the town common and pelted with rotten fruit amidst taunts of being a "Poindexter," they'll understand the lack of tutoring was just a rational function of their Junior Utopia's self-governance.

• MSNBC
• A CBS Reality Show Draws a Claim of Possible Child Abuse [NY Times]

Experts, however, who have yet to see the program but are familiar with the production wonder if it is ethical to isolate children to record how they respond to the stress of taking care of themselves, dealing with one another — and competing for thousands of dollars.

"This sounds terrible, and I think it's unethical," Geoffrey White, a psychologist who has worked on a dozen reality shows, including ABC's "The Mole," told ABCNEWS.com. "Any psychologist working on this production would be unprofessional at best and unethical at most."

White said that when put in the high-pressure situations that have become typical of today's reality shows, even adults can experience serious emotional stress.

"These shows are coercive and use the manipulative power of group pressure to bring out the worst in people," he said.

He said that one of "Kid Nation's" worst abuses of ethics was asking the children's parents to consent to filming without knowing the details of exactly how each day on the set would play out.

"Informed consent is not a foolproof process," White said. "How can you explain to someone that they will lose their capacity to make a decision? You can't say, 'Here's everything you need to know about being vulnerable to group pressure.'"

In defense of his bold, obviously misundersttod attempt at prepubescent utopia-building, the show's producer answered some of the accusations levied at the show:

The audience will discover they're watching "incredible people. ... They're young, but wise beyond their years, doing things you never could imagine," Forman said. There was no sex or drugs, he said in response to a later question.

As for the effect on the children, Forman said that "almost to a one" they consider it a highlight of their lives.

"I exchange e-mails with every one of these kids and they're doing just great," he said.

Forman went on to describe to critics the contents of a particularly memorable e-mail from one of his favorite Kid Nation survivors, where the child admitted to being initially frightened and mentally unprepared for the experience, but revealed that after he survived the harrowing ordeal of their first elimination ceremony in which a homesick contestant was driven naked into the New Mexico desert, he learned the important life lesson that he had to "stop being such a little bitch and toughen up, or else I'd wind up the Wednesday lunch special in the mess hall."

• 'Lord of the Flies' Style Show Raises Ethical Concerns [ABC News]
• The Founding of 'Kid Nation' [TV Week]
• [TVWeek]
• 'Nation' Panel II: You Don't Need a Bike to Backpedal [TVWeek]

At their upfront presentation today, the network took pains to avoid the inevitably dark Lord of the Flies comparisons ("It's an unbelievable community of respect, and you watch them build society," said president Nina Tassler), but after watching the extended trailer posted on the CBS website, we know they're just trying not to scare off an overly sensitive public before the show airs. Above, we've taken a screenshot of the preview's most harrowing moment, where the child clearly cast in the Piggy role admits homesickness and shows a sign of weakness by crying at a "town meeting," then is immediately beset by a pack of stronger boys, who strip him of his clothes, smash his glasses, and drive him out into the desert, all the while chanting, "Sucks to your ass-mar!" in response to his wheezy pleas for mercy.

CBS has a huge hit on its hands, we can feel it.

• Kid Nation [CBS.com]
• Previously: CBS Puts Vampires, Swingers, Exciting Social Experiments Involving Schoolchildren On The Fall Schedule [Defamer]

· Cane: Jimmy Smits! Playing Cuban!
· Moonlight: Vampires!
· Swingtown: Wife-swapping in the 70s! (Read: sex!)
· Viva Laughlin: A casino! Hugh Jackman cameos! The occasional musical number!

As pulse-quickening as we find both swingers and Hugh Jackman, the highlight of the new Fall slate is clearly Wednesday night's Kid Nation (from the producers of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition), a supersecret project that CBS will unleash on the world later today, in which (according to TV Week) 40 "overachieving kids" of ages 8 to 15 are thrown together in a New Mexico ghost town and tasked with creating a functioning society with an economy, laws, and elected leaders. Finally: Lord of the Flies comes to primetime! We can't wait to hear about advertisers' reactions to this afternoon's upfront clip of the inevitable breakout hit, spotlighting the emotionally devastating moment when Piggy is "accidentally" crushed by a boulder. Never let it be said that Les Moonves doesn't know how to create appointment TV.

The entire Fall schedule follows: [via THR]

Mondays
8 pm - "How I Met Your Mother"
8:30 p.m. - "The Big Bang Theory" (new)
9 p.m. - "Two and a Half Men"
9:30 p.m. - "Rules of Engagement"
10 p.m. - "CSI: Miami"

Tuesdays
8 p.m. - "NCIS"
9 p.m. - "The Unit"
10 p.m. - "Cane" (new)

Wednesdays
8 p.m. - "Kid Nation" (new)
9 p.m. - "Criminal Minds"
10 p.m. - "CSI: NY"

Thursdays
8 p.m. - "Survivor: China"
9 p.m. - "CSI"
10 p.m. - "Without a Trace"

Fridays
8 p.m. - "Ghost Whisperer"
9 p.m. - "Moonlight" (new)
10 p.m. - "Numb3rs"

Saturdays
8 p.m. - "Crimetime Saturday"
9 p.m. - "Crimetime Saturday"
10 p.m. - "48 Hours Mystery"

Sundays
7 p.m. - "60 Minutes"
8 p.m. - "Viva Laughlin" (new)
9 p.m. - "Cold Case"
10 p.m. - "Shark"

• CBS fall sked includes five series freshmen [THR]
• CBS Picks Up 'Kid Nation' Reality Show [TV Week]