TV is the new reading

'Baby Borrowers' is televised birth control

When a teething or colicky infant is squalling through the night, or when a toddler gets to decorating the walls or a tween goes missing for a few hours “exploring” in the mall, or when a teenager screams blue murder at its parents in a difference of opinion over attending a midnight showing of something or other at the cineplex on a school night, gets grounded, grumps for several hours, sneaks out and goes anyway with its idiot friends, returning drunk at 2 a.m. and passing out in its own sick on the lawn ...

... parents conceive of a terrible, terrible reality program.

See, you can’t really call the “Baby Borrowers” a game show because there are no prizes. Instead, five unready teenage couples somehow agree to be filmed caring for the children of neurotic parents, who hunch together over monitors in a neighboring home watching everything they do and swooping in and complaining at them for not caring for their children correctly – on top of a really uptight nanny who yells at people for leaving the children unsupervised, even though there was no way for them to know that the children were unsupervised.

The nanny confronted one of them about taking a shower when his girlfriend decided to leave the house. In reality, the girlfriend left the kids unattended, but that didn’t stop the guy from taking the brunt of her criticism.

In the course of the show, the couples had to care for infants, toddlers, tweens, teens and the elderly. They had to divide the tasks of parenting and caretaking between working full-time and providing for their charges, which they had to budget carefully – especially since one of them didn’t seem to understand the requirement. She thought she could be sick and both she and her boyfriend could stay home. Great for the kids, but not great when they couldn’t afford basic needs.

Following the couples’ adventures with the children, some parents got really mean about how not-ready the teens were to take on parenting responsibilities, and lit into them for not instinctively knowing stuff about potty training and changing diapers and bathing infants. But the parents had had months and years with their children and so of course knew all sorts of things the teens clearly didn’t know heading into it.

So, is the show about how difficult it is to be a parent? Because, well, duh. Of course it is. The sheer number of people who flake out, run away, and otherwise do it really badly should be a good indication. Makes one appreciate having good parents all the more.

Is it about karma, forcing the teens to confront all the truly negative aspects of parenting? In that case, when Sasha, one of the teens, got truly frustrated and stormed off, one wonders what could’ve been done to entice her to put up with the rest of the experiment.

Generally, it was an instructive set of days for everyone, testing not only their parenting skills but the strength of their relationships. They seemed to be under a lot of strain three episodes in, but most of them were surviving.

So, the schadenfreude of seeing hapless young people suffer at the hands of children they’re trying to raise may be the only value this show provides – well, that and televised birth control.

“The Baby Borrowers” airs Wednesdays at 7 p.m. on NBC.