I'm not a big reality TV fan, but there's a new show debuting tonight that seems to be creating a lot of buzz.

"Kid Nation" will debut at 7 p.m. tonight on CBS. The show, as advertised on the network's Web site, will give 40 kids, ages 8 to 15, 40 days "to build a brave new world without adults to help or hinder their efforts" in the middle of a New Mexico ghost town. The Web site questions:

"Will they stick it out? In the end, will these Kids prove to everyone, including their parents, they have the vision to build a better world than the pioneers who came before them? And just as importantly, will they come together as a cohesive unit, or will they abandon all responsibility and succumb to the childhood temptations that lead to round-the-clock chaos?"

This sounds remotely familiar to William Golding's 1954 "Lord of the Flies" in which a group of school boys are stranded on an island without adults and must govern themselves to live. Unfortunately for the boys, life turns more into chaos than cohesiveness. Think pig head on a stick.

I'm not nearly as interested in what happens on the show - I'll probably never watch it - as I am of what this means for social experiments, literature and reality TV. I don't know if "Lord of the Flies" was any inspiration for the television series, but if so, is this what we have to look forward to? Can literature be the source of other future reality shows? Can producers turn the works of Lewis Carroll, Mark Twin, or Charles Dickens into reality series? Perhaps there is an untapped world of material within the yellowed pages of English's greatest works.

Reality series seem to get more bizarre every fall premiere season, and I'd hate to think that that may be the only way people ever come into contact with great literature.