“It chokes off your oxygen so you can’t breathe,” Kyri says in new episode of Vice’s “Dark Side of Reality TV.”
Before it even aired, the 2007 CBS reality series Kid Nation — in which 40 children ages 8-15 were plunked in a ghost town in New Mexico to form their own society — was rife with controversy. There were those who opposed the concept of children living unsupervised (except for producers mining their experiment for drama). A parent of one of the children cast even complained to state officials, alleging that multiple children required medical treatment after drinking bleach.
In the latest episode of Vice docuseries Dark Side of Reality TV, Daniel Kyri, who’s now a cast member of Chicago Fire, recalls the moment that he consumed the poisonous substance. His horror story is just one of several dicey moments in the series that, in the days that shows such as Survivor or The Simple Life were proving to the networks they could create popular content at a fraction of the cost. For Kid Nation, for example, one expense — the prizes — were a paltry $20,000 a pop.
Actor Daniel Kyri was one of 40 ‘Kid Nation’ participants
“I just grabbed this sort of faintly yellow liquid,” Kyri, who was known as DK, says, noting that he had just awoken and stumbled into the (dirty) kitchen of the home the kids were sharing. “It’s giving citrus. It’s giving lemon. Like, it’s giving fresh.”
He says he took several gulps.
“And then, a burning. And fumes,” says Kyri, who was then 14. “The fumes that kind of rise up. It chokes off your oxygen so you can’t breathe. Somebody grabs the bottle and she smells it, and she’s like, it’s bleach.”
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Then an aspiring actor who thought he needed to do the show for his career, Kyri ran to “where all the adults were.” He was treated by on-set paramedics.
Another former cast member, Olivia Cloer, explains that only then did they find out the crew had been sanitizing areas where the cast ate and drank.
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“Who leaves bleach in a bottle that looks like it’s supposed to be something that you drink?” Cloer asks. “Around children? What are you doing?”
Producer Emily Sinclair remembers it going down differently, with only “a tiny, tiny amount of bleach mixed with water in one of the bottles” was involved. (Officials later dropped their investigation.)
