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Unhappy campers make 'Brat' questionable

REVIEW: Brat Camp, two-hour premiere, 8 p.m. Wednesday on WFTS-Ch. 28.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published July 12, 2005

The line between news and entertainment, documentary and exploitation, learning and gawking, keeps getting thinner, thanks to reality television.

Lucky us.

ABC is particularly close to the edge this summer with a trifecta of shows that, for all their creators' claims of honorable intentions, looked tacky even in these days of low standards.

First, The Scholar made a game out of bright students' aspirations, promising a full college scholarship for one, while hinting at almost certain lives of failure for the losers.

A few weeks later, the network promoted a show called Welcome to the Neighborhood, challenging seven "diverse" families (black, Asian, Hispanic, gay, poor, heavily tattooed and Wiccan) to earn the affections of wealthy suburban white families. Win over the neighbors, and get a new home on their cul-de-sac.

This one managed to draw the ire of advocates for minorities and conservative Christians, and ABC spiked the show.

That leaves Brat Camp, scheduled to debut Wednesday. The "stars" are nine children, ages 14 to 17. They are troubled kids, defiant, angry, experimenting with drugs, alcohol and sex.

Their frustrated parents have turned their children over to an Oregon wilderness camp that aspires to teach self-esteem, discipline and respect after breaking the kids down through counseling, peer pressure, physical exertion and Spartan living.

The camp, SageWalk, is real. The counselors are trained, the people at the helm are Ph.D.s, so maybe they know what they're doing.

But for the rest of us, it's tough to watch a TV show featuring children shaking with sobs, shivering in the cold, struggling with deeply personal issues, reading painful letters from their parents, and openly discussing sexuality. In a process that would normally be handled confidentially, the faces of these children are beamed across the country, and they're identified by first name, age, hometown and through interviews with their parents.

And to help viewers, a producer said, each child also gets a tag in early episodes, to go along with the name. Labels such as: "Hostile Outcast," "Compulsive Liar," "Self-destructive drug user."

Is this a documentary that will touch families in similar situations, or is it a side show?

Brat Camp executive producer Arnold Shapiro has legitimate credentials. He produced the landmark Scared Straight documentary that won an Oscar in 1978 bringing troubled kids face-to-face with hardened criminals in a real prison to steer them from a life of crime. On the other side, his name is also associated with Big Brother and Blow Out, reality TV at its worst.

Shapiro said Brat Camp (a name he was stuck with contractually when the show concept was imported from England) is a serious documentary that will offer hope to thousands of parents dealing with troubled, ill-mannered children.

Mark Durand had a different view. A University of South Florida regional vice chancellor with a doctorate in psychology, he has spent 20 years studying childhood abnormal psychology. Durand recently landed a $1-million grant to further his studies and has written five textbooks on childhood psychology. After watching the first episode, he was not impressed with Brat Camp.

"I'm not belittling the pain that these families are going through. They are in crisis, there's no doubt about that," he said. "But to hold out the only hope is to let yourself be put in front of a camera and possibly be humiliated? These are children."

In the first episode, at least some of the children appear surprised at what they're in for. They load up with backpacks and march into the frigid desert. They live in tepees, eat gruel around a campfire, are allowed a shower once a week and a counselor appears to find great humor in revealing that the water is ice cold.

Durand had several problems with the show: Producers mix a variety of psychological problems together; children who are sick are labeled brats; and children legally incapable of waiving their rights have intimate details of their lives broadcast to the world.

But another bay area professional liked Brat Camp. Cecilia Tucker is a counselor at Seminole's Counseling Center for New Direction, with 26 years experience. She has a masters in counseling and theology, and writes a teen issues column, with a panel of teenagers, that appears on the Xpress pages Mondays in the St. Petersburg Times. In addition, she has raised three children.

"I don't have a problem with the program. What I think is, there's some kids that you have to draw the line for," she said. "We've got a lot of spoiled kids. They're used to that privilege. Sometimes kids have to get a reality check and learn that you earn what you get."

Brat Camp could help the parents of troubled teenagers see that there is help available, while showing problem kids that they could end up in camp like SageWalk if they don't make changes.

"I'm the kind of therapist who holds kids accountable," Tucker said. "What I find happens is the kids start having the same expectations of themselves."

Shapiro said the Brat Camp families weren't recruited at open casting calls, as is the case for reality shows, they were recommended through a network of therapists Shapiro said he worked with. And, he said, the families weren't paid in cash, although their children did get to attend the camp for free.

"If ABC had called us in and said these kids are going to compete for money, we just wouldn't have done it. We would have walked away," Shapiro said. "I'm pretty careful about what we do when it comes to this kind of thing." The show was made under the ABC Entertainment division, not the news department, but Shapiro says that's because it was made by independent producers, something the news division won't buy into.

He says that by the end of the six-episode run, some of the children change for the better (and so do their labels), and viewers will feel emotionally involved.

But to get viewers hooked, producers blur the line between real and TV. There's skillful editing involved, a breathless narrator, dramatic music and enticing tales of bad behavior.

SageWalk executive director Larry Solie said he agreed to the filming because he wanted to dispel myths that programs such as his are "boot camps," and he wanted to reach the families of difficult teens.

Solie said he doesn't like the title, Brat Camp, and he wrestled with the tone the finished production took as a commercial enterprise.

"What they do is snag you with sensationalism," Solie said. "But by the time it's finished, you're going to have a whole different perception of what we do. Yes, these kids cry. They're away from home, they're used to manipulating their parents and everyone around them."

Taken as a whole, Solie said Brat Camp's intentions are pure.

But what about the viewers? Will they see it as a documentary exploring a tough topic, or an exploitative form of entertainment?

It's hard to grade a show like this. The production is good and the storyline compelling enough to elicit an emotional reaction. Good filmmaking does that. So does raw exploitation.

It's a fine line.

[Last modified July 11, 2005, 16:14:03]