Entertainment

TAKE ME OUT TO THE WALL GAME

IF your idea of fun is being stuck at somebody else’s block party and everyone gets a beer but you — have I got a show for you.

There Goes The Neighborhood,” CBS’ new social-experiment-on-a-budget-series, is one of those occasionally interesting summer replacement series that proves once more that “real” people will do anything to get on TV.

Here are eight families who live next door to each other on a block in suburban Atlanta.

Somehow, the families are taken away and brought back in the middle of the night to find their homes have been encircled by a 20-foot-high wall. They are not allowed to leave for three weeks.

At stake, $250,000 and the chance to see neighbor turn against neighbor.

It’s the reality show version of that old “Twilight Zone” episode where the lights go off and on and everyone turns on everyone.

The lights in this neighborhood go on and off too, but instead of running back and forth with flashlights like “The Twilight Zone,” they face such bigger challenges as “who can hose the mud off the T-shirt first.” (Like I said, block party.)

Each week, one family wins “King of the Neighborhood.” Oddly, though they are demographically very 2009 with a mixed-race family, a single mother family and a two-mom family, the families are strictly 1950s. When it comes to the big decisions, dad is the king in each family. (Well, when there is a dad, at any rate.)

The family who wins the competition each week gets to vote off two other families, which is always a good lesson for the kids in cutthroat relationships.

Presumably only one family will get the boot each week but CBS didn’t send the ending so I don’t know for sure.

The producers of “Survivor” and “The Bachelor” created this show, and it looks it. Everything (except the wall) is standard reality fare, including the incredibly annoying music, the tears, the betrayals and the faux drama.

On the upside, everyone in the neighborhood seems very nice and some of the back stories are genuinely inspiring.

In the two-mom family, for example, one of the women adopted her deceased brother’s children after he and his wife died when the kids were tiny.

So, even though I’ll never watch the show again, I am pulling for them.

“There Goes The Neighborhood” Sunday night at 9 on CBS