Historionics: Neither Here Nor There with Historical Reality TV

“I think we’re really in our ancestors’ shoes, but these shoes suck!” cries nine-year-old Conor Clune to the camera. Conor, his brother, sister, cousin, and parents comprise one of three families picked to live as homesteaders for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary Frontier House. The Clunes and their neighbors, the Brooks and Glenn families, spend five months living in an environment carefully prepared to replicate as closely as possible the conditions of settlers in Montana in 1883, with one notable exception: the cameras. The cameras are supposed to capture “what life was really like” for viewers of the miniseries, including house raising, milking cows in a freak June blizzard, bartering for supplies with the Chinese merchant, and holding a pioneer wedding.2 Frontier House and a host of other historical reality television (HRTV) shows purport to embody (literally) a unique and vitally important new perspective on the past by “putting the flesh on a small chapter of human history.”3 Viewers are meant to apprehend history in a vicarious physical and emotional way, through the experiences of ordinary present day people placed in “the past.” The programs feature a reality TV/documentary format, painstaking facsimile replicas of historical environments, and the casting of regular contemporary people as the main subjects of the programs, relying on the dynamic of reenactment for their content. Reenactment has emerged since the 1970s as a preeminent format for