Frontier House
PBS

Aficionados of the Public Broadcasting System say that its programming has a certain je ne sais quois, an esprit des corps, a character of haute couture that we all should cherish. The rest of us think PBS fans are self-inflating windbags who use French idioms way too gratuitously.

Still, every so often, amid the usual milieu of tedious documentary, recycled Britannia, dried-up dramatics and Lawrence Welk, public television chimes in with a series that targets America's midsection — the one that's falling over its belt buckle.

The vast Baby Boomer audience is now of an age where a little PBS watching gives them a sort of street cred, and most public stations are willing to toss them a bone or two if it results in viewer donations. It's why you'll see hippie holdouts like Steely Dan show up in a PBS showcase, or suddenly find "Easy Rider" playing on "Masterpiece Theater." If there's a pop culture trend that PBS can co-opt to its own devices, it will parrot away.

That, essentially, is what PBS's big new splash, "Frontier House," is all about. It's "Survivor" meets "Little House on the Prairie" — altered reality TV for the generation that invented altered reality.

Here's the concept: Three families hole up in cabins somewhere out in Ted Kaczynski Land and start partying like it's 1883. They hand over their clothes, Cuisinarts, GameBoys and Starbucks cards and adopt the lives and customs of turn-of-the-century homesteaders. Ostensibly, they're in a competition to see who among them can pass historical muster, although the winner gets nothing. Nada. Not even their union suits. In fact, there isn't even a winner. The families live independently, a 10-minute walk from their neighbors. So, while "Survivor" survives on its back-stabbing politics, "Frontier House" plods along at the pace of a pack horse. Instead of trading schemes and barbs with their co-competitors, they trade butter.

This all makes "Frontier House" an extremely realistic experiment in historical living — which is to say, oppressively dull. Here's a gripping moment from a recent episode: When a rancher informs the three families that he will be bringing his cattle through their land, they each realize that they have merely one week to build a fence around their land. I'm sure it's hard to build a fence, but this is TV, where soap-opera children age in dog years and relationships don't live as long as the average fruit fly. One week may have been a cup of coffee in 1883, but these days kids learn Japanese in less time than that. There's just not much dramatic tension inherent in frantic fence-building.

It's not that the show's premise stinks. The same crew created "1900 House," in which a family goes fascinatingly mad trying to live anachronistically in the middle of England (as if England weren't anachronistic enough). That show proved that the concept can work — that there's something inherently cool about watching someone melt down over having to brush his teeth with pig's hair.

But "Frontier House" was made with an agenda. For some reason, the show's producers have the notion that Americans romanticize frontier life. They're out to show us that scything hay all day in 120-degree weather isn't the fun and games we all thought. But to do it, they're forced to play up the drudgery and daily chores. Entire hours revolve around chopping firewood. It's like watching Grizzly Adams without the bears.

Hard work and perseverance are great qualities to have in your investment banker, but they aren't the ingredients of winning prime-time television. PBS should have taken a lesson from Fox and MTV, who now load their reality shows with cooked-up stunts and profane ex-rockers to inject some spontaneity. But leave it to PBS — when everyone else is faking their reality shows, it airs one that is actually real.

— Michael Penn (mpenn@facstaff.wisc.edu)