While NBC and Apple bicker about whether iTunes will carry shows from the network's upcoming television season, CBS is plotting its own online-video coup. Convinced that YouTube's success is based on Internet users' short attention spans, it has decided to create faux user-generated content by remixing its own shows into short clips and releasing blooper reels with the help of a dedicated production unit, EyeLab. To ensure "authenticity," CBS has hired six twentysomethings who will work offsite. That's awesome. Because the only thing possibly worse than loser-generated content is poseur-generated content.

On last night's episode of Kid Nation, the pint-sized utopia-builders of CBS Bonanza City learned the sobering lesson that among the dozens of off-camera adults retained by the network so that their bold social experiment didn't quickly devolve into a prepubescent Jonestown (watch out for that Michael kid—the way that he can make the entire Nation applaud his every utterance is disquieting), not a single one was there to slaughter their chickens for them, requiring that at least one grade-schooler was going to get a crash course in the art of poultry butchering.

Why is Dan Rather facing the ridicule and embarrassment engendered by his lawsuit against CBS? Felix Gillette lists some pretty compelling reasons, none of which include the "crazy old coot with a score to settle" theory. [NYO]

Despite how easy our earlier video of last night's eagerly anticipated Kid Nation premiere might have made life in CBS Bonanza City, NM seem, the children's new frontier existence is not all fun and choosing-whether-to-be-passively-entertained- or-poop-before-your-bowels-rupture games. Being separated from one's parents or pageant coaches for the first time can be an emotionally devastating experience that not every grade-school-age society-builder is equipped to handle, as you can clearly see above in the teary eyes of Jimmy and Taylor.

Even though the pre-release controversy surrounding Kid Nation, CBS's attempt to bring Lord of the Flies-style improvisational community-building to primetime television, seemed to indicate each episode would bring viewers harrowing footage of exhausted 10-year-olds mistakenly chugging bleach or sacrificing their weakest, most homesick citizens to a pack of ravenous coyotes for the good of an evolving society, the physical jeopardy in which the Nationeers were placed in last night's premiere exceeded anything we were prepared for.

• Big Brother 8 Amber After Finale Interview [YouTube via RealityTVCafe.com]

"Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors." Plus! "'Mr. Rather is the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes,' his lawyers write in the suit." Poor Anderson! [NYT]

· CBS has quietly set up preview screenings of Kid Nation at elementary schools in major markets for students, parents, and teachers, where families can come together and discuss the exciting child-labor-law issues raised by the controversial new series, as well as receive assurances from the network that no children were eaten by bears during the show's production, even though that unlikely eventuality was covered by that now-infamous waiver. [Variety]
· HBO Films greenlights a feature version of Grey Gardens, the 1975 crazy-cat-lady documentary that has also recently spawned a crazy-cat-lady Broadway musical, and which will star Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. [THR]
· In an onscreen pairing that will result in a dramatic showdown between the dreamiest and the sleepiest sets of blue eyes in all of Young Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire are in negotiations to join Brothers, director Jim Sheridan's remake of a Danish-language war drama. Our prediction: after their first shared scene, Maguire locks himself in his trailer, ashamed that his orbs will never sparkle like Gyllenhaal's. [Variety]
· Star Trek's JJ Abrams chooses Zoe Saldana as the new Uhura. [THR]
· Huzzah! The Fall TV season is here! And while we didn't watch the solidly rated premiere of Fox's K-ville last night, it's nice to know that we have finally something to neglect besides shows about remembering karaoke lyrics. [Variety]

Quincy Smith, head of CBS's online business, on competing networks News Corp. and NBC's online video play Hulu: "I love everything about the joint venture and the notion of syndicating content with distribution partners that are already proven in the business, both in the video-destination and the widget business. But why—why still hold on to a destination [Web site]? That's a huge amount of infrastructure, that's a huge part of investment and frankly, a huge distraction." [Forbes]

• Court hears case of the wardrobe malfunction [USA Today]

Pretty much everything you need to know to get a sense of how bad things were for the networks during last week's Nielsen apocalypse is contained in CNN.com's always-handy Story Highlights box. Except for this fun fact: that ratings-leading Two and a Half Men episode was a rerun. This, of course, is great news for CBS, which now knows that when it can't be bothered to make even a token attempt at providing its viewers with fresh entertainment, it can still count on ten million people to show up and mumble along with months-old Charlie Sheen punchlines instead of flipping over to see if anyone had their hearts explode on a first-run episode of Fat March.

· Sacha Baron Cohen is "firming plans" to star in Bruno (but aren't they already shooting that one? Sneaky!), then will move on to Dinner for Schmucks, a remake of Francis Veber's Le Diner de Cons, a comedy about a dinner guest whose manners would shame even the tableside-feces-proferring Borat. [Variety]
· TBS orders a second season of The Bill Engvall Show, keeping the weakest member of the Blue Collar Comedy family working for an additional ten episodes. [THR]
· Var provides a blow-by-blow of the Whoopi Goldberg's controversial, Vick-defending first day on The View. [Variety]
· TV viewers desperate for the networks' new Fall programming to begin settle for watching CBS placeholders Power of 10 and Big Brother 8 on Tuesday night. [THR]
· Pedro Almodovar pre-casting shocker! The Spanish auteur plans on giving Penelope Cruz the starring role in the film he's currently writing. [Variety]

Reporters have been barred by CBS from asking Big Brother 8's Amber about the "controversial" remarks she made about Jews that were captured by the reality show's all-seeing cameras. [Reality Blurred]

Over the weekend, a correspondent came across a white BMW S.U.V. It was parked just off West End, around the corner from Zabar's, about four feet from a fire hydrant. Its user, 88-year-old Andy Rooney, was wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and tan pants with white sneakers. According to our spy, his belt was right under his armpits and his eyebrows needed trimming. Also? His press card, taped to the windshield, the presence of which presumably made him feel he could hydrant-park, was long-expired. (Shouldn't he have his press vehicle card on the car—isn't this his working press card, and doesn't it say "Not for parking purposes" on the back?) Good for you, grumpy old maybe-racist column man! In any event, you'll all be pleased to know his registration doesn't expire until 2009 and his emissions is good through '08. You may be alarmed to know he's on the road in a large car though.

If you count yourself among the slim minority of party poopers hurling hysterical and irresponsible accusations of child abuse at the producers of one of the most important social experiments of our time—i.e. the reality TV dystopia known as Kid Nation—then we refer you to the impassioned testimony of a participant's mother on yesterday's Access Hollywood. Having apparently helped herself to some of the bleach-tinged Kool-Aid made readily available in a large barrel in Nation's town square, the CBS-sanctioned mouthpiece compellingly argues how not even the occasional burning or poisoning could detract from the good times being had at this adult-free "summer camp environment," at the end of which anyone over the age of 15 is disposed of in a fun, fiery ritual known as Carousel.

While we're sure the 22-page waiver (just posted on the Smoking Gun) the parents and guardians of Kid Nation participants had to sign prior to shipping off their children to 40 fun-filled days in a New Mexico ghost town is nothing more than a boilerplate document that could be used to indemnify the proprietors of any summer camp that intended to film its own amateur production of Lord of the Flies against nuisance lawsuits, scanning the litany of potential disasters lawyers could envision befalling the Nation stars still makes for a pretty good time.

A new show in CBS' fall lineup, Kid Nation, which took a bunch of kids and stuck them in the desert in New Mexico to live on their own for 40 days, is currently embroiled in controversy because the network made parents sign a 22-page waiver so their children could participate on the show. Basically, it seems like CBS took advantage of parents who were either willfully ignorant or saw the show as their kids' ticket to fame. Or maybe both! The financial rewards were laughable—$5,000 for participation, with a possible $20,000 bonus—and the penalties were severe: $5 million if parents or kids broke the confidentiality agreement. Ouch. Oh, and also? CBS owns the rights to the children's life stories in perpetuity and throughout the universe.

People hysterical over the alleged child endangerment issues surrounding the production of Kid Nation—CBS's reality TV show/summer camp/Lord of the Flies hybrid where each episode ends with one child being giving a $20,000 gold star and another being devoured by his or her more socially manipulative castmates—persist in stirring up trouble for this Fall's upcoming breakout hit.

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Tiny People Injected Into the Sickly Body Of Originality Edition: Roland Emmerich will direct a remake of Fantastic Voyage for 20th Century Fox. [Variety]
· Production has temporarily stopped on 24 so that the hit show's writers have enough time to adequately dramatize every apocalyptic scenario that would probably come to pass if a Hillary Clintonesque president ever assumed our highest office. [THR]
· Former Daily Show/Colbert Report EP Ben Karlin explains the just-announced, combined film/television deal he signed with a certain premium cable outlet: "When my reps asked me what I wanted to do next, I said firmly, 'not TV.' They said, 'HBO.' I had to admit, they had me there." [Variety]
· ABC's new NASCAR in Prime tanks its premiere, probably because the show clearly belongs on Fox. [THR]
· Jerry Bruckheimer informs CBS that it must buy his drama pilot about a "globetrotting team of freelance treasure hunters" or he will withdraw every one of the 45 weekly hours of programming he generates for them; the network, of course, happily complies, remarking about how much they always wanted a more expensive, scripted version of The Amazing Race. [Variety]