Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frontier life: feuds, divorce, and all kinds of drama, August 5, 2005
You gotta love PBS. They make reality tv somehow more dramatic than all the contrived network shows put together. It makes for uncomfortable but fascinating viewing.
Three families volunteered to live as Western frontiers for five months. Log cabins, hunting, trying to farm in the harsh Montana land. The way the three families reacted is so realistic that I really thought I was seeing an 1800s frontier documentary.
The Clunes are upper-class, from California, and dont adapt well to the no-frills frontier life. They cheat. A lot. At the same time, they become closer as a family. One of the most touching moments of the series was when Gordon Clune admitted that in the 20th century, he and his wife were overly abosrbed with each other and their life of luxury. Living together in a logged cabin made him closer to his children.
The Glenns, OTOH, are middle-class, and led by an iron-willed, formidable matriarch, Karen. Her husband chafes under her iron fist, and their marriage unravels. Karen alienates her neighbors quickly. The children are uncomfortable. At the same time, the family adapts to frontier life much better than the upper-class Clunes. Perhaps many frontier families needed a strong, even ruthless matriarch to survive. Watching the Glenns also gave me a sense of the stress the harsh frontier life must have taken on families. By the end of the series, Karen's husband Mark is a shell of a person. He seems shocked at how much his life fell apart.
The Brooks, a newlywed couple, are by far the most appealing family on the series. They represent the optimistic frontier spirit. They are peacemakers in the petty squabbling between the Clunes and the Glenns.
The series is filled with drama, and moments of humor.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Covered wagons and log cabins, August 3, 2006
I've seen all of the DVD's in PBS's The House series. Out of all of them, I'd say that Manor House and Frontier House are the best of them.
Frontier House is pretty realistic in terms of the clothing, the setting and scenarios follow the lives of the original pioneers as closely as possible. Seeing modern day families try and relive that style of life is entertaining and highly engaing and educational. We forget how far we've come from those days in the past and how much we rely on modern day technology. My favorite example is TOILET PAPER!! Not only do these poor folks have to build their own outhouses, they have no toilet paper, only a small tin of water, some leaves or a small rag that has to be cleaned then reused. We forget how lucky we are to have indoor plumbing!
Although the families are not the most engaging because they seem reluctant to give up modern day conviniences and complain about the harsh lifestyle and hard work, you understand their struggles and hardships. Watching these familes become more closely knit and work as a team is facinating, and shows just how hard our pioneer ancestors struggles to build lives for themselves.
As the show progresses, we watch new challenges arise, such as running out of food, dealing with livestock, building log cabins and other buildings such as outhouses and chicken coops. Learning how to slaughter and butcher animals is another task that has to be mastered, along with learning to farm.
PBS did a wonderful thing introducing this series of "time travel" shows. Not only do we learn about different periods in history, but we learn how modern day people interact and live in these settings. These are wonderful to watch with your family and children, and would be great in a classroom setting.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Clunes --- the family you love to hate, January 22, 2004
Rarely have I heard so much whining in a PBS series. My god, the Clunes --- everyone I knew who watched this had pretty much the same thing to say about them. Rich, priviledged and delusional, the Clunes drove us all crazy with their whining and self-serving rationalizations. They were like a car accident --- they sickened you, but you couldn't help but watch them.Watching the Glenns on the other hand was pure agony, as you witnessed the disintegration of a marriage that appeared to be cracking up even before the Frontier House experiment. Although they proved to quite equal to the task (the Clunes, by contrast, would have had to resort to cannibalism to survive the winter), the Glenns might have ended up killing each other somewhere along the way. I suspect that the Glenns, unfortunately, depicted all too accurately many a domestic situation on the historical frontier. If you have photographs of your 19th-century ancestors, particularly those who were sod-busters, take a good look at those faces. They are the faces of weathered, hardened people who have looked adversity in the face. Watching this series will make you understand why they looked so hardened. Of course, the Clunes never would have gotten a chance to get their portraits made, because they would be dead.
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