UPN Amish reality TV: reverse 'Simple Life'?

It wouldn't be the first time the Amish have actually been on television.
By ELLEN GRAY
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
HOLLYWOOD -- The Amish may not be interested in television, but television seems to be interested in the Amish.
In recent months, both CBS' "Judging Amy" and NBC's "ER" have done stories on the Amish rite of rumspringa -- Pennsylvania Dutch for "running around" -- in which formerly sheltered teens are allowed to socialize without adult supervision before deciding whether or not to commit to the Amish church. Even the pay-per-view series, "Can You Be a Porn Star?" boasts a contestant who claims, somewhat suspiciously, to have been raised among the Amish.
And now UPN's decided that the Amish should have their own "reality" show, in which five Amish young adults experiencing rumspringa share a house with five non-Amish peers. Two of the show's producers worked on the critically acclaimed Amish-themed documentary "Devil's Playground," which aired on Cinemax, while a third worked on CBS' "Big Brother."
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, who also oversees UPN, recently compared the so-far-untitled show, which he said would probably air this summer, to a "reverse version" of Fox's "The Simple Life," the hit show in which rich girls Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie lived with an Arkansas farm family for a month.
No insults intended
"This is not intended to be insulting to the Amish," said Moonves, who ran into problems in 2001 when he tried to develop a "reality" version of "The Beverly Hillbillies" for CBS. Rural advocates launched an ad campaign against the idea that eventually led 43 members of Congress to demand that Moonves drop it altogether.
"It's culture clash. It's not one instead of the other," Moonves said in an interview afterward. "It is interesting to have a person who has never had a television, who has never seen a television, to see a television for the first time," he said.
Earlier, he'd also suggested it might be interesting to see people "who will walk down Rodeo Drive and be freaked out by what they see."
UPN entertainment president Dawn Ostroff said she hadn't seen "Devil's Playground," which reported that 90 percent of Amish teens who experience the traditional taste of freedom eventually decide to join the church. If they don't, "it's their choice," she said.
Ostroff said she didn't know where producers would be going to cast the Amish teens. Members of the Amish sect, who avoid most modern technology, live in 25 states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Negative reaction
"The whole thing sounds very absurd to me and extraordinarily artificial," Donald Kraybill, who's written several books about the Amish, said in a phone interview.
Kraybill, a senior fellow at Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, said that despite the impression some have that rumspringa is a period, beginning about age 16, where the children of the Amish run wild, "all it means is that they can go out with their friends" on weekends. Most, he said, participate in such group activities as volleyball and singalongs.
"The adult baptism is really the very important rite of passage," he said, noting that one isn't technically Amish until then. Typically, the Amish are baptized between the ages of 18 and 22, at which point they're expected to observe all the rules of their church. Those who aren't baptized can't be excommunicated, but in some cases their families "might be angry and the relationship would be strained," he said.
It's "very atypical" for someone to move far away from home during this period, he said.
"What you saw in 'Devil's Playground' was an accurate depiction of the wildest of the wild, but it's not typical of average Amish youth or typical Amish teen behavior," he said, adding, "The only ones who would permit a photographer would be the extreme" individuals.