A Historian Who Helped Out on a PBS Series Reflects on His Experience
"If you knew what you were getting into, would you do it again?" That question was recently posed to me by one of the producers of the PBS series Colonial House, after I had just completed more than a year as a lead consultant for the show. A follow-up to such popular shows as Frontier House and Manor House, the series is an effort to blend reality television with history. A group of modern day" colonists" spent four months of 2003 experiencing the life of settlers in 1628 Maine. The colonists undertook a crash course in seventeenth-century living, were provided with historically accurate food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities, and had to carve out a colony on the harsh and unforgiving shores of a new land. They were filmed regularly, and the result was an eight-hour series that premiered May 17....
So, was Colonial House perfect? Reality never is, and reality television is no different. I had an excellent relationship with the production team, professionals who were genuinely concerned with historical accuracy. However, if I had been the producer rather than a consultant, I would have changed a number of things. First, the show needed far more historical explanation right up front to set the stage and explain the limitations of the series. For example, I would have more clearly laid out how the show portrayed race in 1628. Some viewers who knew that Africans had not migrated to northern New England this early were puzzled to see apparent free blacks in our colony. No, there were no Africans or Chinese (or Italians for that matter) in 1628 New England, but Americans with these and other proud heritages are an important part of the 2003 effort to recreate a founding moment of our American nation.
It is difficult to explain complex ideas like joint stock companies and seventeenth-century Protestantism in televised sound bites, but a stronger effort was needed. The differences between Puritanism and Anglicanism—differences for which people in the era Colonial House portrayed fought and died—were never really discussed on screen. I fear many viewers will equate the governor’s enforcement of the Sabbath with Puritanism, without realizing that this was the norm in the Protestant world of 1628, and that our colony was actually loyal to the Church of England.
I would have avoided the twenty-first century as much as possible. The narrator acknowledges that people in 1628 did not celebrate birthdays, so why include the birthday party and other clearly modern moments? When I did enter 2003, it would have been to discuss the historical research that shaped the colony. Plimoth Planation deserves far more credit than it got for the hundreds of hours its staff put in, making sure the architecture and material culture were as accurate as possible. Perhaps it is the deluded historian in me, but I think people would have been fascinated by how the colony was put together....