Frontier House

Frontier House is a historical reality television series that originally aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States from April 29 to May 3, 2002. The series followed three family groups that agreed to live as homesteaders did in Montana Territory on the American frontier in 1883. Each family was expected to establish a homestead and complete the tasks necessary to prepare for the harsh Montana winter. At the end of the series, each family was judged by a panel of experts and historians on their likelihood of survival for each group.
Cast.
Three families were chosen to be on the show:
Production.
The success of "The 1900 House" (which aired in 1999) and "The 1940s House" (which aired in 2001) inspired PBS to commission a similar historical reality television series set in the United States.
The budget for the series was $4.1 million, which included $3.3 million for the production itself and $800,000 for promotion and the website. Most of the funding came from PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and British public service broadcaster Channel 4.
Casting.
More than 5,500 families applied to be on the show.
Preparation.
The participants spent two weeks in classrooms and kitchens, learning about the history of the period and gaining expertise in animal husbandry, carpentry, chopping wood, clothes washing, cooking, farming, gardening, harvesting skills, personal hygiene (without the use of toilet paper), sewing, soap making, and other skills which the average person in 1880s Montana would have known. The participants spent their days learning skills in Virginia City, Montana—a restored ghost town, open-air museum, and National Historic Landmark. To reduce culture shock, the participants were permitted to sleep in a modern hotel and enjoy modern activities (like television and bowling) at night.
Participants agreed to abide by a set of rules, which included the following:
Anyone was free to leave the show at any time, although participants were asked to consult the production team first and record the decision on the video diary.
In preparation for leaving for the homestead site, participants were allowed to purchase whatever items their budget could afford—so long as it could fit into the single horse-drawn covered wagon provided to each family for hauling goods. The wagons were, in fact, quite small and held few goods. Each family packed and repacked their wagons repeatedly to get more goods into them.
Departure for the homesteading site, where the three families would live for five months, occurred on May 21, 2001.
Production notes.
The three families were on site from June to October 2001. Filming ended on October 5, 2001. More than 500 hours of footage were shot.
Dissent was a common occurrence on the series. Karen and Mark Glenn were shown repeatedly attacking one another verbally. Rob Owen, writing for the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette", noted that the Glenn marriage "begins to disintegrate as holier-than-thou Karen harshly harps on Mark for everything and anything. Karen comes off as gleefully despotic and her behavior sometimes makes "Frontier House" painful to watch, especially when you consider how her children are affected." David Zurawik of the "Baltimore Sun" questioned why the show focused so much on the Glenns' marital problems. "Is [the series] about seeing a strained marriage crack up with a husband calling his wife 'Hitler,' while she mocks him for 'whining' constantly?" The Clune family, too, was singled out for constantly complaining. Viewers of the show routinely attacked the Clunes for being "the overprivileged Black Hats" of the series. Gordon Clune and Karen Glenn also clearly disliked one another. Gordon Clune accused the producers of goading Karen Glenn to anger by telling her about critical things that the Clunes said about her, and vice versa. But the producers denied that. A reviewer from the "Baltimore Sun", however, said it was apparent that the producers edited the series to make the conflict appear worse than it was.
The Clune family was caught cheating on several occasions. They secretly put a box spring mattress beneath their bed, sneaked off the homestead to sell baked goods, stole fish from a neighbor's lake, and smuggled in shampoo, soap, and cosmetics. Due to state hunting laws and regulations, and based on the opinion of the production's safety experts, none of the homesteaders were permitted to hunt for game. Gordon Clune voiced his intense dissatisfaction with this rule repeatedly during the production. Clune and some of the other men on the show stole video cameras from the production crew and "hunted" deer with them in an attempt to prove that they could have shot the animals. Clune and the other men asked for meat to be given to them, but the producers denied their request.
Competition among all three families was intense. The producers later said that the decision to have the homesteaders prepare to survive a Montana winter led to this competition, which was a regrettable and unintended side-effect.
During production of the series, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, and on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., occurred. The producers discussed whether they should tell the participants and decided it was appropriate to do so. Local newspapers from nearby towns were given to the participants to read so that they could learn about the attacks. The participants were permitted to read the newspapers for several days in a row to stay abreast of what happened. Nearly all the homesteaders expressed their satisfaction with the way the situation was handled, and appreciated being isolated again. Kristen Brooks was not happy at the time with this decision. She said she was convinced that the production should have shut down for a few days to permit the participants to learn more and to determine if any friends had died in the Twin Towers disasters.
The site of the homesteads.
Filming of "Frontier House" occurred in an undisclosed valley on a ranch approximately south of Big Timber, Montana, owned by Ken Davenport. The Montana Film Office spent weeks trying to locate an appropriate site for the production. The site had to be isolated and only rarely overflown by aircraft, but also had to be accessible via automobile. The area had to be viable for agriculture as well. This turned out to be a problem, as many of the sites investigated had such poor topsoil that they could not be used.
The Davenport ranch was a historic one. The Crow Nation had originally been given the area as a reservation, but they ceded it back to the United States in 1882 in favor of a larger parcel of land to the east. This historic fact would lead the series producers to hire Dale Old Horn, Crow tribal historian, as a consultant on the show (he would also appear on-camera) and to have Crow hunters arrive to help feed the participants.
Each family was given an plot of land to farm, graze animals on, and build a home on. All three "homesteads" had easy access to a creek, and were within a 15-minute walk of one another. The country store run by the fictional Hop Sing Yim (played by local Montana historian Ying-Ming Lee) was away, and required hiking on foot over two mountain passes.
The production crew numbered 15 individuals, broken into two units. The team included two directors, each of whom was responsible for three of the series' six episodes. Only one production unit was used to film most events in the series, although during major events (such as a visit to the country store, a visit by Crow Indians, or the wedding) both production units would be filming. Initially, whichever production unit that was filming lived in tipis and filmed every day. (The "resting" production crew stayed in a small town about 75 minutes away.) These production unit living quarters were about away. But in time, both production crews moved into town, and filming occurred only about every three to four days.
The production team learned that it was common for homesteaders in Montana in the 1880s to find abandoned cabins, and to live in them while building better housing. To recreate this experience, the production team built a cabin for the Glenn family. This cabin was based on historic plans for a miner's cabin which the team had discovered in library archives. A partially built cabin (mimicking a cabin which had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair) was provided to the Clune family, while the Brooks family had to build their cabin from scratch. It took Nate and Rudy Brooks six weeks to build their cabin. During that time, they slept in tents and suffered through several weeks of below-freezing temperatures at night. It also snowed and rained for several days during this time. The Glenns invited the Clunes into their cabin, but the Clunes declined.
Broadcast.
PBS originally intended to broadcast "Frontier House" in January 2002, but switched the air date to April 29 through May 1. This allowed the network to market "Frontier House" at the same time as other new series and specials, saving advertising dollars. The decision to air the show against other series on broadcast television networks during the highly popular May sweeps was strongly criticized. The "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette", for example, said that this decision meant fewer people watched "Frontier House" than would have at other times of the year.
The series was re-edited with new commentary and a new narrator. The reworked episodes, still titled "Frontier House", were shown on the DIY Network.
Reception.
"Frontier House" was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Program (Reality) in 2002.
It has been described in an academic review as "a critical, self-reflexive interrogation of romanticized visions of the U.S. nineteenth-century life on the frontier".
Similar reality series.
"Frontier House" was followed in 2004 by "Colonial House", which recreated daily life in Plymouth Colony in 1628. In 2006, PBS aired "Texas Ranch House", which recreated the life of a family and ranch hands on an 1867 Texas longhorn cattle ranch in Texas.