Customer Reviews

Colonial House

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I really wanted to like Colonial House. I really did. I thought 1900 House was good, Manor House was better, and Frontier House was excellent. I figured by having a whole colony of people, this would be the ultimate living history. Unfortunately, this was not to be. My biggest question is did the Voorhees family even read the rules on the application, or did they go just to prove how 21st century they really are? I mean, she didn't even TRY to live by the 1628 laws. Skinny dipping on the Sabbath? In 1628? INSTEAD OF CHURCH?? And how about Jonathon Allen? To really feel as if it were 1628, and to prove to all he would abide by rules of days gone by, Mr. Allen should have kept his homosexuality a secret until the final day, and especially to not come out in church! That would have proved to all that you were truly trying to live by 1628 laws. Come on folks! If this were truly the seventeenth century, both subjects would have been burned at the stake! If you're going to sign up for a project like this at least TRY to abide by the laws and rules of the times!! That's the whole point - to see if a 21st century human could survive in a different time period. If you want to skinny dip, fine. If you're gay, fine. But neither was acceptable in the time period you were attempting to live in. Even the British guy ventured off to the future for a couple of days to go drinking in a modern pub. Why did you all sign up? To promote your political agendas? This is not a knock at anyone's lifestyle - this is a frustrated viewer and lover of experiments like these "House" shows. All you proved to those of us watching was that you all couldn't hack it. So you decided to make it almost into a 1960's commune instead of a 1628 colony.
To me, the attitude of the Voorhees family really brought the whole project down. Their 21st century ideals spread like a disease to the others in the colony except the first Governor, who was chastised by the rest for truly following the rules of 1628.
At least the participants in the past "House" series, for the most part, made an attempt to live in the chosen period of which they were selected.
I sure hope the powers that be are a little more selective in choosing people for any future experimental "living in the past" House shows. Colonial House was not worthy of the quality I've come to expect from PBS. It was as if Fox or WB took it over and tried to create controversy instead of a quality reality show.

PBS should have stopped this fiasco the moment the players refused to play by the rules of the 1600's.

20st century selfishness destroyed this program. What mattered to the players was not what they could do for the community, but how they could please themselves, yet still play the game. The strict rules were ignored and mocked, which made nonsense of the entire production.


In Colonial times you either went to church or you went to your death. The Colonists were highly religious people. That one family chose skinny-dipping over church services on Sunday was ludicrous. They should have stayed home and let another family experience this once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

After getting to church you certainly wouldn't tell everyone you were homosexual and expect to survive. But a gay young man decided to out himself one morning prior to service. He was embraced 20th Century style, but would have been stoned 17th century style. He's another one who should have stayed home.

Another young man, bored with the century, left the community and sought out a local pub, a serious no-no according to producers. He later returned to the colony, bragged about his adventures and picked up where he left off. Yawn.

Tisdale, an African-American, couldn't handle the manual labor or his sudden desire to enslave others to do his work. He walked off the show with a frightening and depressing understanding of why slavery came into existence.


The most offensive scene was when the local Indians paid the colonists a visit, only to berate them for what their ancestors had done to "their people". That insulting conversation would never have taken place inside a homesteader's cabin while the homesteaders grinned and apologized for the white man's actions.

As far as offering a peek into 1600 living, Colonial House offers little to nothing. A much better production was FRONTIER HOUSE in which the participants adhered to the rules and regs of the pioneer days.

I watched Colonial House with mixed feelings. After reading the reviews here, I expected to hate it. Overall, I enjoyed many elements of this reality show. First, I liked the setting. Maine was absolutely beautiful, and the costumes were excellent.

I liked the Hentz's. I also liked Jonathon Allen. Despite one over-dramatic episode at the end of disk 1, I felt he really did try to play his role quite well and he was quite likeable. I felt sorry for the governor trying to get people to conform to the rules and laws of the times.

I did not care for the Vorhee family at all. Mr. & Mrs. Vorhee spent a great deal of time showboating, and I hated the part where they went skinnydipping instead of attending church like everyone else. If they want to lead 21rst century lives, why volunteer for this experiment? I felt they were a drag on the show, and the experiment would be better off without them, particularly Mrs. Vorhee whose irritating and shrewish opinions we were subjected to on a regular basis.

Overall, not bad, although Manor House still remains my favorite. Too bad, the show did not screen candidates more carefully. A more committed cast would've made the show more interesting.

IF you have to eat the food that was eaten in the 1600's, and IF you have to wear what was worn then, and IF you have to do all the daily chores that were done then, and IF you have to put up with all the physical unpleasantness that went along with the time, and IF you are truly trying to represent the actual time, then this has to be viewed as a failure of almost epic proportions. For, if you follow the rules stated above, then the rules for everything else should be followed. Hey, you want to come out of the closet in 1600's New England, then you are courageous. Unfortunately , you would also be pressed to death, hanged or , if you were lucky, very lucky, run out of the colony. And the same fate would have befallen anyone who praised you. Horrible, but true. A woman in charge of a congregation? Really, now. Also something unfortunate, but true. If one is trying to portray history, they could at least portray it honestly. It was an offensive culture by our standards, but it was what it was. So, this does just become a Survivor wanna be. One need not be a Christian to attend meeting on the Sabbath. One went because to not go was suicidal. I am sure there were atheists back then, you'd just never know it. So, IF the show was realistic, when these folks did socially unacceptable things they would be punished as was fit for the times. Obviously that would not be acceptable socially or legally in these times. So, they could have at least FAKED it. Banish people from the set, instead of making a distracting Survivor-copy masquerading as an historical study.

My biggest problem with this series was how they told the tale. They would show 'colonists' having emotional or angry outbursts, and it always seemed they were over reacting because they never show what led up to that boiling point.

For example two different times you see two different goat-milking women lose their sh*& because of the work. The problem is that other than the comments they make during their respective meltdowns ("it's dirty, it's gross"), you haven't followed their goat-milking struggles, have seen no tension build and consequently don't feel the least bit connected to their misery when they have their fits.

Another example is with the servant guy who works for the preacher and his wife. He says at the beginning that he didn't want to 'get stuck' with them, but you never know why. (Were they mean to him? Do they have body odor? 'Tis all a mystery!)

Still another example is when that same guy is so sad when the black woman leaves (sorry, hard to remember names when these people don't mean anything to you). It's only as she's leaving that you find out she's his best friend there and they 'hang out all the time.' They don't tell you that until the moment she's leaving, and you're supposed to feel sad for his loss?

Also, inexplicably, they tell you what some people do in their 'real' lives, and leave you in the dark on who the others are. Overall, it's hard to feel invested in any of their lives, or their relationships.

Finally, they spent most of the time showing the most annoying people (the governor and his family, and the preacher and his wife). The freemen seemed like fun, but you hardly got to know them at all.

This was a big disappointment, and could have been a winner.

Can one take a group of modern Americans (plus one Brit), plant them on the coast of New England, and have them build a brave new world as their ancestors had in 1628? Nope. They didn't even try.

This 2004 PBS show represents five months filming on the coast of Maine, and marks a low-point in their creative programming. The people involved in this project included a Baptist minister - now, you would expect him to be cast in the role of the colony's minister right? Wrong. Instead, he was given the role of colonial governor. The role of minister was given to a liberal professor of religious studies. The entire colony was filled with people with chips on their shoulders, who evidently never did intend to live by the 1628 rules.

All that I can figure is that the creators of the show wanted the governor to turn into a tyrant and force the people to act correctly - as no doubt a real 1628 governor would have. Heck, even a real-life management consultant slipped in to rein in the cast of rejects failed utterly to turn things around. The visit by a local Native-American tribe had all of the warmth of a visit by the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution - something that it greatly resembled.

No, all I can say is that the creators of this dog of a show planned to have it fail spectacularly, and all it did was splutter and lay down and die. I generally love the similar reality shows, including 1900 House and Frontier House, but this one I hated. It could have been a great show like the others, it should have been a great show like the others, but it's not a great show, or a good show, or even a fair one. This is a very disappointing TV show, and all I can do is recommend that you skip past it and keep going!

I had actually considered trying out for Colonial House; I abandoned that plan when I knew one of the questions on the application would have red-flagged me for sure ("Do you suffer from allergies?").

I missed 1900 House, and was introduced into the House series with Frontier House, which was very good, and Manor House, which, even though I don't really feel much if any cultural connection with the British, I thought was absolutely masterful.

What could be better? Forging a new nation in an untamed wilderness. Instead, Colonial House offered us little more than watching people do chores and condescending historial revisionism. The two biggest flaws with Colonial House were an unacceptably high level of turnover among the cast and a similarly unacceptable lenience with respect to the rules of the project.

The other two miniseries seemed to be more clear in their mission than this one. Colonial House never seemed to be sure if it wanted to recreate 1628 under with 2003 people playing 1628 roles or playing themselves.

I'm not sure why half of the people on the show did apply, however. Hugh Edgar, the butler on "Manor House" (who participated to understand his own grandfather's experiences as a butler in an Edwardian manor), mused about the servants who complained constantly about work: "What did they expect? Did they just come to be on television?"

Immediately after Michelle finished telling the other women of the colony about how women were "at the bottom of the ladder and that's the way it is," there seemed among the other women to be an air of the sudden realization that this was the case when it should have been perfectly obvious.

I guess if I had to sum up in one word why Colonial House wasn't as good as the less-imperfect Frontier House it would have to be "survival," especially beyond the time constraints of the project. This theme was accentuated much more, especially when the focus of the assessment was, "Can these families survive the winter?" There was a drive in the waning weeks to secure enough firewood and provisions whereas in CH it seemed more that the colonists were just waiting for the clock to run out. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the assessors may not have fully agreed with their own decision at the end.

At eight hours, it's two hours longer than either Frontier House or Manor House. I taped it when it originally aired, but I probably won't watch it again. If you are very interested in the early American colonial period, it might be worth checking out if it is rerun on your PBS station or if there is a copy in your local public library, but it's not worth owning.

This Colonial House was my least favorite of all the House series. The volunteers were not well chosen because they belly ached and refused to make it an authentic experience. Some did not play by the time period rules--very aggervating. I would love to be a part of these experiments and I can't stand when someone wastes the opportunity.
While still a fascinating series, I wasn't drawn in like some of the other House series because of the constant conflict.

I'm posting this just to let people know that it's not just right-wingers who object to all the anachronistic liberal sanctimony that this series unfortunately degenerated into. The cast's blatant rejection of any attempt to actually follow the rules of the period and set their own values aside did a great disservice, not only to the historical integrity of the series, but to those values themselves. Part of what made series like "1900 house" so interesting was seeing these modern, egalitarian people actually struggle with the social mores of late Victorian England The wife was uncomfortable being waited on by a servant and living with the constraints of Victorian respectable middle-class womanhood, the husband was uncomfortable having the amount of power over his wife and children as a Victorian husband and father would have had. But they did their best to play their roles and the struggles they had with them and their own reflections on those struggles brought the period to life and also drove home how much times have changed.

It would have been similarly fascinating to see this group of people struggling to subvert their modern-day egalitarian morality while trying to live this lifestyle but that's not what happened. Instead, the cast wasn't interested in authentically experiencing the period at all. Why do this if you don't want to learn? Their own egos took center stage which means the audience is deprived of both the window into history that some of the other historical series have provided, and the interesting contrast of historic values to contemporary ones. I'm liberal also, but I don't want to see a bunch of people who's values I agree with parade around in 17th century costumes and preach their views. I want to see them let go of what they hold dear, put themselves in a deliberately difficult situation and live it as best they can, in attempt to teach us and themselves about both our past and our present. That's what these series are supposed to be about.

Skip this one and watch the excellent 1900 House.

The premise of "Colonial House" was supposed to be a 1600s working Puritan colony. A Puritan of 16th and 17th century England was a Protestant (usually Calvinist) a advocate of "purity" of worship, doctrine, and personal and group morality. The Puritan's stressed the importance of obtaining salvation through the development of an individual relationship with God (through the person of Jesus Christ) over attempting to obtain salvation through the sacraments and ceremonies of the church alone. Obviously, the observance of the Sabbath, religion and faith would've been an important part of a typical Puritan colony.

A Puritan colony would've typically been comprised of people of similar faith, values and morals, all trying for a similar goal. The people PBS picked were anything but similar and they had no intention of even trying.

It was interesting to see in the "Making Of" extra, that one of the producers said they had spent an extremely long time trying to find people who TRULY wanted to live the lives that THE PURITAN's lived in the 1600's. I can't imagine that they searched that hard. Many of the participants come across as extremely disagreeable & very selfish. Many of them selectively choose in which portions of early settler life they would like to participate and with which portions they can't be bothered. This was ludacris, because, they all knew before hand what was expected of them. I found myself thinking that it's a good thing our nation's survival didn't depend on them.

The governor of the settlement (one of the only serious participants) really had no power to enforce the rules & as a result most of the participants tended to blatantly ignore the spirit of the experience. For example, one of the most difficult of the female participants wouldn't come to the Sunday Sabbath services (this was REQUIRED in a Puritan colony). It was an essential and mandatory part of Puritan settler life. She choose not to come because she doesn't believe in God, even tho, the Sabbath services held were made very non-comformist & very non-1600 Puritan to placate her. Before long 75% of the colonists are skipping the mandatory Sabbath. Then later, there was also a "Jerry Springer-type" moment of confession on one Sabbath day in a room full of young children, which in the 1600s a Puritan would've been burned for or at least kicked out of the colony. Before long no one was following even the smallest of the experiment's requirements.

If the participants were more genuine and earnest about trying to live like the early Puritan settlers instead of constantly taking the viewer out of the experience with silly arguments & their spoiled brat behavior, this program would've been a lot better.

If it hadn't been for the informative voice overs explaining interesting facts about early colonial life I wouldn't have continued after the 2nd episode. I will give it 3 stars for the voice overs and for the participants who did follow the spirit of the experiment.