A despot welcomes a riot. Disorder provides an excuse to rescind liberties in the name of restoring calm. There are only two choices, after all: chaos and control.

The creators of Supernanny and Nanny 911 understand this. Each week they poke their cameras into a dysfunctional suburban home where the children are bouncing off the walls and the parents are ready to climb them. There's whining, there's yelling, there's hitting...and the kids are just as bad. But wait. Look up there: It's a bird. It's a plain-dressed, no-nonsense British nanny, poised to swoop in with a prescription for old-fashioned control. Soon the clueless American parents will be comfortably back in charge, the children will be calm and compliant, and everyone will be sodden with gratitude. Cue the syrupy music, the slow-mo hugs, the peek at next week's even more hopeless family.

Of course, the choice of anarchic households sets us up to root for totalitarian solutions (anything to stop the rioting). Moreover, we're asked to believe that families can be utterly transformed in a few days and to assume that the final redemptive images reveal the exceptional skills of the nanny--rather than the program's editing staff. We might just laugh off the implausibility of these programs except that they're teaching millions of real parents how to raise their real kids. To that extent, it matters that they're selling snake oil.

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