Frontier House Redux

The television scene looking like the vast wasteland it is, after the obligatory stop at BBC America for Changing Rooms/Ground Force, we put on the tape of Frontier House the other night--I’d only seen the first part and the last part, and James the last part. So we watched until halfway through part four, after Nate and Katherine’s honeymoon and she is adjusting to pioneer life (and can’t stand the way her hair feels).

After all these weeks I still want to bean everyone. The kids whine, Karen Glenn is a martinet, the Clunes don’t do what they need to and then they complain. Nate and his dad are the only ones who stay reasonably likable.

I kept laughing aloud, too: everyone except Nate said they didn’t know it was going to be so much work. Sheesh. Evidently they’ve never read any books about real life on the frontier, even something as elementary as the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and have subsisted on Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman and the TV version of Little House on the Prairie. One of the historical advisors said as much earlier: they think they’re out here on a camping trip--but they can’t pack up after a couple of days and go get a shower. Gordon Clune goes to the general store and buys a bunch of expensive tinned peaches because the family complains about the bland food (well, duh, guys, sometimes all they ate was cornmeal mush and potatoes, and when the sweetening was gone, they went without for months), then realizes he's put himself in debt to get it. Even sillier, Mrs. Clune was even mourning the lack of intimacy—she thought they’d have time to creep out into the woods occasionally and have romantic trysts! Does this woman subsist on nothing but bad romance novels or what?

And please tell me why, after finding their cow that had wandered away in the snow and that they had nothing to go outside in except underwear and blankets because their clothes were still wet from laundry day, did the Clune girls insist on milking the animal near the Glenns’ corral? Wouldn’t the more sensible idea have been to take the critter home posthaste, warm yourself up in front of the stove for a few minutes, then go back out to milk her? Why on earth drag the cow and a full bucket of milk the entire mile home? These girls are not little kids; they’re both in their teens and should have learned some type of reasoning by now.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:10:00 PM

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