Willow Glen, California Since 1992
Opinion
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PBS strays again from goal of public education (By Carl Heintze ) Nostalgia, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, ain't what it used to be. I am referring, however, not to baseball but to the recent attempt by the Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBS) to show us what it was like to live in 19th century Montana on the frontier. It was, in a word, tough. This is hardly a surprise, even perhaps to 21st century PBS. Whether or not it is instructive, educational or even worth watching as entertainment seems to me to be debatable. PBS has transplanted three families back to those good old days for a brief period to live as at least some Americans used to live - without benefit of rural electrification, flush toilets or hot water heaters, among other things. They've even thrown in a "frontier" general store to show us what was and wasn't available, with a genuine Asian storekeeper. Life in those days, PBS would have us believe, was no picnic, even if the period covered wasn't winter. And, as anyone knows who has been in Montana in the wintertime, the cold time of the year is even less a picnic. The network tried to be authentic about it all. It built its "settlers" a cabin or two, provided horses and furnished supplies that were supposed to be like those one might be able to purchase a hundred years or so ago. Some participants had to build their own cabin, using 19th century tools. PBS has made much of all this "back to the beginnings" with all kinds of what television calls promos. Alas, the series is not an original idea. It was adapted from an earlier British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) series in which a family of Brits was installed in a Victorian house and put through the same set of discomforts to show us what it was like in the London in which Jack the Ripper prowled the streets by night. Tough. No fun. The premise of both these programs and of such modern-day messes as Survivor is that it is possible to somehow synthesize reality. And, as everyone knows, it's "real" television that gets the viewer's attention. If that weren't so, we wouldn't have news anchors constantly giving us "live" reports from the scene of the murder, the accident or the disaster. Of course, even though they are standing more or less where something real took place, they are hardly giving us a "live" picture of anything. History has already gobbled up whatever happened. "Live" coverage is only giving us a reprise. And so it is with those poor sufferers from the modern age in what purports to be 19th century Montana. It may look like the Montana of old, like the perils of the frontier, as if hostile Indians aren't far away and so on, but, in our heart of hearts, and in the heart of hearts of the participants, we know it just ain't so. We know, they know and the producers of all these shows know that this isn't reality, that when the series is over the "actors" will return to the present and they'll have to deal with its terrors or discomforts, not those of a frontier that's long gone. Just as the "survivors" of Survivor aren't really surviving anything except a lot of artificially induced discomfort, so the frontier families are putting us on. It doesn't matter that great effort has been made to duplicate the things with which people in the 19th century lived - it just isn't history. It's hokum. And it makes me believe that PBS is straying again from its goal of public education, just as it is with its unending attention to Antiques Roadshow, also a BBC transformation. The network can do better - far better - it seems to me, and it did when it aired presentations like Ken Burns' The Civil War and Jazz and David McCullough's examination of the Panama Canal. These series are based largely on contemporary photographs. True, they are black and white and they are mostly stills, not motion pictures, but they are real samples of real history, untampered with by producers from New York or Washington or wherever PBS producers hang out most of the time. History, especially as rendered in The Civil War, can not only be gripping and fascinating to watch, it can be meaningful and educational, too. But it isn't reality. It's history. It's not what's happening. It's what happened. Subjecting a group of 21st century Americans to the artifacts of American history doesn't prove anything except that we have come a long way from washboards, wells and candles. That doesn't necessarily mean we are better off. It means reality is where we are now. It ought to mean to television producers that you can't fake history. You can record it. You can reexamine it. But it is darned hard to reproduce it. Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com. |
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