Bringin' Down the House

Twenty-six grimy people in buckle shoes and corsets, four colonial cabins, six months of back-breaking labor and puritanical laws: Welcome to another slice of "experiential history" as crafted by the creators of PBS' latest reality show, Colonial House (May 17-18 and May 24-25, check local listings).

The eight-episode series is the network's latest foray into hurling modern Americans into uncomfortable historical settings. Past versions have included Manor House and Frontier House, where families squirmed under the yoke of upstairs-downstairs, master-servant relations or struggled to build homesteads in "19th-century" Montana.

With Colonial House, the time machine is set to the earliest year to date -- the participants are going back to the "roots of our nation." And this time, they're bringing back lessons about forging an ideal society, about the pitfalls and problems of building a "City upon a Hill" that have remarkable parallels to our nation-building efforts in the Middle East.

PBS has an unusual approach to its reality programming, highlighting cooperative efforts over the usual competitive fare of Survivor, The Apprentice, The Bachelor, and The Swan. By taking a cultural form that usually reveals the ugliness of American's cult of Me -- my fame and money, my man, my new self-esteem in the form of breast implants -- and using it to talk about communal dynamics, PBS has hit upon a perfect way to examine the tension between the ideal of individual liberties and that of societal cohesion.

Colonial House still has the obligatory reality-TV gross-and-sex factor. The participants shriek at disobedient goats, play midwives to a pig, and hunch in the cornfields and over the chamber pots in their 1628-era houses. In between retching at the sight of maggoty meat and lamenting the lack of privacy for sex, they work to make a profit for the English "company" that sent them to this harsh coastal area of Maine. Their "governor," however, has goals that transcend the bodily and economic realms: He dreams of creating a community that reflects the glory of God.

Historically, building that "City upon a Hill" was a humbling slog from the get-go. Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop borrowed the phrase from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14) while trying to inspire his villagers toward realizing their colony as a beacon of Christian values in 1630. (He would give up years later, writing that "sin abounded" in his colony.)

These days, we've made it even harder to be the light of the world. We've expanded the mandate of the "City upon a Hill" phrase -- no longer content with the near-impossible task of embodying moral perfection, we're actively attempting to remake other countries in our high-wattage image.

It has backfired, of course. Our methods of transforming Iraq into a model democracy, into President Bush's "source of hope ... an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both," have dimmed our own reputation; we now sit in the dark with besmirched hands, staring at pictures of the barbarous means we've used to accomplish our enlightened end.

Colonial House's Governor Jeff Wyres' dilemma is not as dire as the one that faces Bush. But his struggle to shape a model city reflects the president's predicament in small-screen proportions and shows how a utopian drive can descend too quickly into chaos.

In real life, Wyers is a Baptist preacher from Waco, Texas. Each person on the show is given a role by the producers -- preacher, freeman, servant, widow -- and Wyers was appointed governor. Wyers starts off with an optimist's belief in his fellow humans. "I came here under the belief that everyone would follow all the laws," he says. But when he's confronted with lazy villagers who loll in bed and use unholy language, he has to grapple with the conundrum that faces every revolutionary and utopist: What does a good leader do when his people don't do what is good for them?