“Frontier House” is the sequel (or is that prequel?) to “The 1900 House,” in which a family in England lived for three months in a town house scrupulously retrofitted to Victorian conditions. It was a spectacular marriage of reality TV and history seminar, and it became PBS’s most-watched mini-series of 2000. PBS has tinkered with its formula for “Frontier,” which debuts April 29. For one thing, the new show features three families, instead of one. That means three times as much history–and three times as much history-induced misery. More important, these are Americans, so you can forget all that British stoicism. Americans whine. Americans cheat. Americans have no compunction about complaining that the frontier is ruining their sex life, among other marital woes. “We’re at divorce level,” Karen Glenn says to the camera in the middle of a fight with her husband, Mark, about who rules the log cabin. “I’m ready to kick him out and just do it by myself.” PBS thought “Frontier House” would be Laura Ingalls Wilder come to life. What it got was “Little Grouse on the Prairie.”
That’s not to say that “Frontier House” skimps on the history lessons. Chicken plucking, cabin building and hay chopping occur regularly, complete with helpful voice-overs. PBS hired more than 20 history consultants to keep the show as true to 1883 Montana as possible. “We still made mistakes,” says Beth Hoppe, executive producer for Thirteen/WNET. “The leather we used on the gentlemen’s suspenders hadn’t been properly softened, so the buttons fell off. They had to hold up their pants half the time.”
But it’s hard for the civics lessons to compete with a civil war. As the show moves through its six episodes, the Clunes and the Glenns become the Hatfields and the McCoys. The Clunes–at a disadvantage because they’re a family of six and they’re from Malibu–kvetch about hunger. The Glenns–a family of four from the log-cabin side of Tennessee–think the Clunes are wimps. “They had beans. They had rice. That’s not starving,” Karen tells NEWSWEEK. “What I saw in Montana was this spoiled family who was not getting the food they wanted.” The third family, Nate and Kristen Brooks, often get lost in the cross-fire. “We felt like we were in the middle,” says Nate. “There was obviously some tension, but I’m sure that happened in the 1880s, too.”
Six months after leaving the “frontier,” the Clunes and Glenns still can’t stand each other. In an interview, Gordon Clune can’t say anything nice about Karen Glenn. “There’s something scary there,” he says. “There’s something very, very sad in her life.” Karen is still smarting about when the Clunes broke away to trade for food with some 21st-century neighbors. “In the 1880s you couldn’t go across the fence to the modern world to satisfy your needs,” she says. Gordon defends himself: “We traded for venison and root vegetables that would have existed at the time. That wasn’t so bad. We thought there was no other choice.” Karen begs to differ. “There’s this one clip where they talk about using peanut butter for mouse bait,” she says. “There was no peanut butter in 1883.” Perhaps. But on “Frontier House,” there were plenty of nuts.
