TV Reviews : ‘Seeds of Hope’ Looks at Troubled Teens

The hype hook of “Seeds of Hope,” an hourlong documentary on today’s troubled teens, is that some of the outlaw youths being documented were given video cameras to record their own delinquency. But, despite host Edward (“The Equalizer”) Woodward’s dramatically intoned warnings that we’re about to see street scenes no documentary crew could ever capture, the kids-with-camcorders angle is a promotional red herring.

The show (which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on KTLA Channel 5) does end up as a transfixing piece of TV, but it earns its marks the old-fashioned way, by having its real camera crew record some telling domestic confrontations squarely in the great voyeuristic tradition of PBS’ “An American Family.” After a slow beginning, the question of why Johnny can’t behave finally gives way to that of why Mom and Dad can’t parent.

The opening isn’t promising: Standing amid a row of blank-faced teens, Woodward speaks of infiltrating this youth culture just as quasi-anthropologically as if he were Marlon Perkins reporting from some newly discovered, near-extinct jungle colony.

But the quartet of kids the show focuses upon--all from the suburbs of Annapolis, Md.--gradually comes into focus. There’s Stefan, a 14-year-old wildcat with a rap sheet longer than most career felons; Coco, a 15-year-old ghetto kid who deals (but doesn’t use) drugs; Chris, a self-styled punk of 18 who casually declares “I really hate people--I wouldn’t hesitate in killing someone”; and Sally, 16, an ex-dealer who provides the one real “seed of hope” promised in the show’s title.

In its second half, the show offers a pretty severe indictment of where some of these kids’ problems come from. Parents struggle not to blame themselves for how their offspring turned out, when they could clearly stand to take on a lot more blame.