For starters, producer Tom Forman owes an apology to "Survivor's" Mark Burnett, inasmuch as this effort dips repeatedly into the reality TV patriarch's bag of tricks, from the trumped-up challenge to the pounding music.

In that regard, the manipulation here is so overt as to be almost laughable. When a kid gets a leg cramp and others help him, the music swells the way it did whenever Martin Sheen delivered one of those stirring speeches on "The West Wing." And when a girl wins the right to call her mom, voila, there's a camera right there to capture mom's reaction.