ABC has announced that its new Brat Camp reality series will premiere Wednesday, July 13 at 8PM ET/PT with back-to-back hour-long episodes. Following its special two-hour debut broadcast, Brat Camp will air regularly on Wednesdays at 9PM ET/PT.
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Similar to ABC's currently airing Dancing With The Stars series whose time period it will inherit, Brat Camp is based on a United Kingdom program of the same name that was created by Twenty Twenty Productions. Produced stateside by Arnold Shapiro and Allison Grodner (the same folks responsible for the last four editions of CBS's Big Brother, UPN's The Road To Stardom With Missy Elliott, Bravo's Blow Out, etc.), Brat Camp will follow six families that decide to send their troubled teenagers to the Sagewalk Wilderness Therapy Camp, a therapeutic wilderness intervention program located in the high desert country of Central Oregon.
"This show will feel more like a documentary than most reality shows," said Wong told Daily Variety when the network first announced plans for the show back in January. "It won't feel as fabricated."
If the concept sounds familiar to some diehard reality viewers, it should -- the network's ABC Family cable channel aired broadcasts of the original UK Brat Camp series earlier this year.
According to Variety, the nine participants range in ages between 14 and 19, and while they're not delinquents, Grodner stated that "virtually all of them are doing illegal things involving drugs and alcohol."
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Despite the fact that ABC describes Sagewalk as a "boot camp-style program" in its press announcement, Grodner had stressed to Variety that the program wasn't an adolescent boot camp. "This is not about yelling or screaming at kids. It's not a military camp," she told the trade paper. "It's about taking kids out of their comfort zone, getting them back to basics and helping them learn how to face their issues."