#Super sweet16 com series#

“I think every kid should have to go do this,” her father said. Now 19, she will start college this fall. “Look at what they worry about: they worry about food and water every day.”Īfter returning, she moved out of her parents’ home, got a job in a tanning salon and began hosting a local television show. “I don’t need the finest things in life,” she said. She called the experience “a blast,” but also “kind of like a wake-up call.” (She refused to touch it.) But eventually she made the best of the trip, sharing dance moves with her hosts and discussing the role of Masai women. Nor was her profound unhappiness when she had to walk several hours for water and help make a hut from a messy paste of cow dung. “I thought it was going to be something cool to go to, that they were not going to send me some place bad.” (Her father said that she was expecting Maui or Rome or “as a worst case, China.”) Her stunned reaction when told she would leave the next day for Kenya was not faked, she said. “I was like, ‘O.K., I’m down, I’ll do anything,’ ” she said. Tillander was game even without knowing the details.

#Super sweet16 com series#

Arnold, 27, an executive producer of the series and founder of Press Play Productions, which teamed up with the production company Left/Right for “Exiled!” The series “jolts them from being in the hypnotic state of American overindulgence,” said Ms. Arnold hopes the series will propel them to learn more about water sanitation, malaria nets and child trafficking through a companion Web component being assembled by the United Nations Foundation. Jenna Arnold, a former United Nations Works employee who, with Ryan Golembeske, came up with the idea that eventually became “Exiled!,” sees the 22-minute episodes as “an infomercial for activism.” By meeting sheltered young Americans on their own pop-culture viewing turf, Ms. A noncelebrity version of the capers of the socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie in Fox’s “Simple Life,” the MTV series lets viewers revisit the coddled kids of “My Super Sweet 16” they love to envy and hate.īut “Exiled!,” which begins Monday after “The Hills,” has higher ambitions than the garden-variety reality show. Now-older former stars of that network’s series “My Super Sweet 16,” which revels in the excess of coming-of-age birthday parties for the rich crowd, get sent by their fed-up parents for a week of re-education at the hands of the Masai in Kenya, a Thai family living off elephant tourism money, and Andean llama herders. For a formulaic reality series, MTV’s new “Exiled!” arrives with heavy expectations.