Colonial House

The latest in an increasingly long line of public television "reality" programs featuring modern day people trying to live according to the rules and limitations of a more primitive past, "Colonial House" is by far the worst produced and least successful. In previous incarnations like "Frontier House" and "Victorian House" (or something like that) the participants at least seemed willing to try to live up to the obligations they took on when signing up. In "Frontier" for instance, they went in knowing that they were going to have to build their own dwellings and grow their own food. They were surprised by how hard it was, tensions flared, etc. But they never acted like they didn't know what the whole point was--to live like pioneers.

The people in "Colonial House" act as though they had been kidnapped and forced to participate against their will. I mean, the whole point was to live the 16th century early-colonial life and we have one woman who bitches without end about how women are treated as second class citizens and about how she shouldn't have to go to church services because she's an atheist. Commendable sentiments in the 21st century, but crap like that would have gotten her burned as a witch back in the old days. So, if she's not willing to play along with the concept, why did she sign up to be on the TV show? And what's with all the indentured servants complaining about having to do what they're told? They're supposed to be SLAVES for God's sake! They signed up to be just that! Didn't any of them look up the term "indentured servitude" before they went to the show's auditions?

I suspect that the producers of this new show have purposely set it up to be an only half-real "Real World" ripoff instead of the usual documentary experiment, complete with pre-set conflicts and phony drama. For instance, one colonist has a dramatic moment when he "comes out" to the rest of he colony and announces that he is gay. I mean, come on--like it matters? Did anyone ask? It's not like anyone expected that he was going to marry one of the wenches or anything, right? A totally fake moment of drama. And not the only one. The show is rife with obviously staged moments and impossibly perfect camera placements. And on top of that, almost every single one of the Colonist is annoying as hell (except for the bearded guy who says f*ck all the time and the governor's hot daughter).

I have firm suspicions that the almost entirely inept "Colonial House" is really a brilliant new mocumentary by Christopher "Waiting for Guffman" Guest.

I have found these programs to be very interesting and this is the 3rd or 4th that I have watched that deals with modern day people returning to another time. I did enjoy watching Colonial House but many viewers seem to fault the program for its lack of rigor in forcing the colonists to stick with 17th century laws. Overall I found the program educational but it really did teach more about 21st century views toward the colonial period than it did actual 17th century life. I remember when I was in history class, one of the first points for students to remember is that all contemporary views of history are clouded by your modern day perceptions. One can never completely understand how people of a different time thought because our views will always be clouded by our knowledge of the present and our present day beliefs. The show gives a somewhat good account of what it was like to come to a new, distant land with nothing, establish a community and the hard work that went into making it grow. What was distracting was the modern-day participants tendency to whine about the drudgery of daily life in the 17th century and their refusal to participate fully in the experience. Well of course, it would be like returning to a leper colony and being surprise that there are sick people there! So I also found it very annoying when the participants refused to participate in mass, accept subservient positions, accept male-female and class differentiations. All were accepted and unbreakable foundations of 17th century British life. The rules in the 17th century were enforceable due to the ability to inflict serious punishment and death on the offending individual. This of course would not be allowed in the modern day so the colonists are allowed to basically fall into a quasi-17th century colony with plenty of 21st century lifestyle choices thrown in. More like a camping trip with farming and bad hygiene. All in all, I found the program most interesting when it showed the construction of the colony, the work required to make it grow, and the narrator's accounts of how life would have been. I also found it very annoying to hear the native Americans account of "we know what our ancestors would have thought." Well sorry...you are modern day people of a 21st century world. You would no more have known what people 400 years ago were thinking at any particular moment than I would know what a cave man was thinking. So the program sometimes tends to veer off into tedious modern day politicized rants. Back in the day, the people would have probably just settled such discrepancies with a good flogging and hanging. End of story.

This series is *much* weaker than either "Frontier House" or "Manor House". None of the volunteers ever really tried to act colonial. The participants had no clue about teamwork, unity, or community. Mostly, they spent valuable time whining and bickering.

The women griped about the lack of women's lib. The atheists griped about church. The "colonists" slept until 10.00am every day, drank, and cursed. A gay guy came out of the closet (a death sentence in the 1600's).

These fools would have either starved or murdered each other if they were *really* in the 17th century. The concept was good, but the volunteers ruined the experiment.

This program reminded me that how well-constructed "Survivor" is as a TV program (although I am not a big fun of it). A fundamental problem with this series is that people never played a real role. They just completed a "task" everyday. Without a $1M reward or 15 min fame after the show, how could you make participants get serious? The producer's answer to this question was "to choose the people who really love the history".

Another problem was that the experiment's length. "6 month"! No "functioning" member of the modern society can't take that long hiatus. As a result, almost all participants are losers and weirdo. And again, there is no systematic device that made them get serious. With these two factors, the show was bound to be a failure.

If this show was supposed to have modern folks live and recreate "living" during Colonial times, well, it's a failure on all counts. The people are mostly annoying and don't seem to care about living and becoming their historical roles. The whole set-up is haphazardly enforced. The show makes for dreary viewing.

I'm not a fan of reality shows, like SURVIVOR or BIG BROTHER. So when I heard about this show created by PBS, I thought "This one has potential to be interesting". Well, I thought wrong.

BTW, Oprah was invited to participate for a couple of days. Her appearance was probably thought up by some producer (most likely a friend of Oprah or a friend with a producer of the Oprah show) because they knew the show wasn't working and they needed someone to help keep the whole project from falling apart.