Cliff Lipson, CBS Jonas, left, Miriam, Randy, Ruth and Mose are experiencing a very public rumspringa on UPN's reality show "Amish in the City." Click photo for larger image.

UPN hitched its rising fortunes to a cart full of Amish youth and rode that buggy to a ratings peak Wednesday night. The network, which airs in Pittsburgh on WNPA, Channel 19, usually ranks at or near the bottom of the prime-time ratings barrel, but Wednesday night's premiere of the controversial reality show "Amish in the City" vaulted the little network to No. 2 among adults 18 to 34 and adults 18 to 49. Among total viewers, UPN's "Amish" bested programming on ABC and The WB.

In Pittsburgh, the show ranked No. 3 in its time period in household ratings, a strong showing compared to WNPA's usual lackluster performance. In New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, "Amish" ranked No. 1 in its time period in overnight ratings.

"Amish in the City," which will air regularly at 8 p.m. Wednesdays through mid-September, follows five Amish young people, ages 18 to 24, who are plucked out of their Middle America communities and inserted in a glitzy Hollywood Hills home with six city kids. The city kids are an eclectic mix that includes a jock, a man-hungry gay guy and a spacey vegan girl who believes cows are extraterrestrials.

Some critics suggested that producers stacked the deck to favor the Amish over the city kids and thereby avoid further controversy by portraying the Amish as "the good guys," a cynical but plausible appraisal.

All the Amish kids on the show are already going through the rite of rumspringa, a "running-around" period of discovery during which they leave the Amish community to sow their wild oats and decide whether to commit themselves to the Amish church for life.

For most Amish youth, that means moving a few miles away from their families, not going almost 3,000 miles to Los Angeles.

"It isn't just another rumspringa," said Levi Miller, who was born into an Amish family that converted to Mennonite when he was a child. "This is an extreme form. ... Usually the whole running-around period would be closer to home. This is really very unusual."

Reese is one of the roommates who isn't Amish in the UPN reality series "Amish in the City." Click photo for larger image.

Miller, director of Herald Press, a division of the Mennonite Publishing Network in Scottdale, Westmoreland County, shared the concerns of many when UPN announced plans for "Amish in the City."

"The idea of having innocents and rustics exposed to the city and then implicitly making fun of them for their cultural isolation, for their religious beliefs, seemed all wrong to me as the basis of a show," Miller said. But then he watched it Wednesday night and came away feeling differently.

"By having the Amish with West Coast types who are really quite different and kind of off-the-wall and certainly intolerant and isolated in their own kind of way, it kind of neutralized that issue," Miller said. "I'm not sure if it's because of my background, but I kind of enjoyed it."

Miller wasn't the only one to have a change of heart. UPN's Harrisburg station, WLYH, refused to air "Amish" Wednesday night, but after station executives screened the premiere with community leaders on Thursday, they decided the show would go on.

In Wednesday's two-hour premiere, which repeated last night, the Amish kids were in awe over escalators, riding in an airplane and seeing the ocean for the first time. One Amish youth, Mose, almost drowned in the heavy surf. Miller thought in some cases producers coaxed participants to overreact to the newness of the outside world, but other times he believed their reactions were authentic.

"Parking meters have been around in small towns for 50 years, so for the one young woman to be [amazed by them] seemed really quite out of character," Miller said. "Mose might have overreacted in terms of how endangered his life was, but having said that, I think that was an authentic religious experience of his praying."

"Amish in the City" suggests its participants will come to a decision about whether to stay in the city or return to the Amish at the end of the show. At a Los Angeles press conference last week, producers added to that perception.

"There is a destination," said executive producer Jon Kroll, who previously worked on CBS's "Big Brother" and "The Amazing Race." "All of these people are at a crossroads in their lives, and it's definitely going to a decision-making point."

Miller said in reality a decision to return to the Amish fold is more gradual.

"That seems bizarre in an Amish sense," he said, but, he acknowledged, "most reality TV is sort of set up."

Could appearing on a reality show and experiencing more of the outside world than what most Amish experience on rumspringa have an impact on the lives of these participants?

"A decision from a standpoint of being informed is bound to be a decision that is more carefully weighed and has more weight to it than one that is uninformed," executive producer Kroll acknowledged. "We tried to position this from the beginning as something that would serve to inform people as to what different aspects of this life would be to help them in making that decision."

For her part, one of the Amish youth, Ruth, said appearing in "Amish in the City" can't erase what's in her heart.

"Doing the show and experiencing so much more than any of the other Amish people have ever had, sometimes I do think about going back or whatever," she said. "I've really enjoyed this moment, but I still got Amish in me. I always got in my heart, 'You know what? I used to be Amish.' "

Miller, author of the Herald Press book "Our People: The Amish and Mennonites of Ohio," grew up in Holmes County, Ohio, a three-hour drive from Pittsburgh. He said his sister in Ohio has Amish neighbors who are aware of the UPN program and were interested in how the Amish were portrayed.

"But my own feeling is most Amish will ignore it and keep right on going because their whole way of life is based on ignoring much of what happens in the world," Miller said, "which is why they're so successful in doing what they do."

If only it were that easy for the rest of us rubberneckers to avoid the siren song of what's too often train wreck TV.