PBS reality series ‘Colonial House’ creates interesting drama

Take a group of disparate people and put them in a foreign location without all the tools of modern society.

The goal: to have them create a thriving community.

What? Not to stab each other in the back for money? What kind of reality TV is this?

It’s PBS’s brand, next on display in “Colonial House,” an eight-part series that airs from 8 to 10 p.m. today and Tuesday as well as May 24 and 25. It follows in the footsteps of such PBS programs as “Manor House,” about an English family in an Edwardian country house, and “Frontier House,” about three homesteader families in Montana.

In “Colonial House,” 24 volunteers from across the United States and Britain moved back in time nearly 400 years to the year 1628 in order to become a reincarnation of the Pilgrims. They moved into four single-story cottages in Machiasport, on 1,000 acres of Passamaquoddy land, living as many as 12 to a dwelling from mid-May to October of last year.

Their mission was to establish a colony while sending valuable goods back to England, in order to repay their sponsors the costs of the move to the New World.

This could have become a drab historical society re-enactment or a gung-ho experiment by committed idealists, but the series, a co-production of Thirteen/WNET New York and Wall to Wall Television of London, ends up a mesmerizing, fish-out-of-water drama.

The producers have done an admirable job of finding a

group of people with widely different motives for taking part in the project. Conflict is bound to arise when you make a conservative Baptist minister from Texas the colonial governor and a liberal California religion professor his second-in-command.

It’s easier to handle the backbreaking labor and primitive living conditions of the era than it is to set aside the present-day mentality and get into the mindset of 1628, where only the men mattered and women and indentured servants held about the same second-class status. This is what fuels most of the drama of “Colonial House.”

The question soon becomes not if the colony is going to survive, but who is going to stay and who can’t stick it out. The series points out that settlers often faced dire conditions and this group of hardy explorers isn’t in much better shape despite having civilization only miles away.

“Colonial House” is a fun place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Dale McGarrigle can be reached at 990-8028 and dmcgarrigle@bangordailynews.net.