TV Tonight: Be My Baby, Temporarily

Borrowers' temporary families. / NBC

According to The Media and Society, you are Very Concerned about the Suddenly Pressing Topic of Teen Pregnancy. Perhaps you are concerned because of this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or even this. Whatever the cause, it would take a very dull TV executive not to connect all these dots and see that they form a line pointing straight to a high-concept reality show. That show, debuting tonight on NBC, is The Baby Borrowers.

In it, several teen couples are lent actual babies, by actual parents, to practice caring for and, thus, have any romantic notions of parenthood dispelled for them. (They're monitored, and in some cases corrected by, the children's real parents.) Is it any good? Very possibly! I can't tell you for certain because the show was originally scheduled as a winter strike replacement; I watched it several months ago and have no idea what I did with the screener. But as I recall, it was surprisingly evenhanded, neither turning parenthood into a joke nor dispensing easy moral judgment.

That's what I think I remember, anyway. But it could all have been a dream! I have young children myself, and therefore I'm generally too addled from exhaustion to rely on my memory.