“I’m living history right now,” Stacey Loper proclaims in the premiere episode of Magnolia Network’s Back to the Frontier. That’s not to say she’s thrilled about it. A career woman who cherishes the comforts of her 4.5-bathroom home, Stacey has already teared up several times during her first day on a 1880s-style homestead, over such indignities as having to use a decrepit outhouse and feed her family cold canned ham. The assumption underlying this reality series, which transports three families to swaths of farmland near the Rocky Mountains for a summer-long simulation of life on the American frontier, is that such suffering builds character.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Does it, though? Executive produced by Magnolia co-owners and lifestyle gurus Chip and Joanna Gaines, Back to the Frontier (which airs on Thursdays will also stream on HBO Max) is the latest in a long line of historical-living challenges that date back to the Y2K-era reality boom. The series bears a particular resemblance to 2002’s Frontier House, a quasi-educational program that marked PBS’s if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em foray into the genre. But whether it’s the gamified, mid-aughts MTV’s The ’70s House or one of the BBC’s many hyperspecific period throwbacks (Edwardian Farm! Victorian Farm! Victorian Pharmacy!), the implication always seems to be that it’s inherently noble, enriching, and authentic to adopt the ways of our ancestors. It’s as though “real life” ended with the advent of refrigeration or indoor plumbing or, well, TV. Magnolia’s version isn’t the most persuasive of these shows. Even if it were, though, I’m not sure I would buy the fundamentally conservative message it’s selling.
To its credit, and although it could easily have chosen to pander to the reactionary tradwife crowd that embraces all things rural and homespun, Back to the Frontier resists going fully retrograde. The show’s casting is, in many ways, diverse. The Lopers are a multigenerational Black family; Stacey and her husband Joaquin have two boys, ages 12 and 14, and are joined on this adventure by Joaquin’s mom, Shirley. (Contrary to the nagging-mother-in-law trope, Shirley, who spent much of her life on a farm, seems sweet, and Stacey is grateful for her help.) Like Stacey, Hall family matriarch Lina runs a business. She and her husband, Jereme, have two teenage girls and an 11-year-old boy. The sisters are shocked to discover they have to share a bed with their squirmy kid brother. Rounding out the cast is a two-dad crew: Jason Hanna, Joe Riggs, and their twin 10-year-old sons. Hardcore tech enthusiasts, the Hanna-Riggs men are soon in withdrawal from their video games, smartwatches, and robot vacuums.
As different as they are, these families have a few things in common. They’re all, for some or perhaps no reason, from the South. They also all appear to be middle- or upper-middle class; while Stacey calls the Lopers’ lifestyle “lavish” and the Hanna-Riggs are homesick for their housekeeper, there’s footage of the Halls splashing around in a lushly landscaped private pool. In the three episodes I was able to screen, each family comes across as close and caring. Magnolia did not, it seems, cast the show to maximize intra-household drama. Most of the parents have trouble getting their kids to work hard on the farm, but beyond that, the only real friction that emerges early in the season is between stubbornly independent Jereme and the more community-minded Lopers. (The harmony-loving Hall daughters are mortified by their dad’s prickliness, which culminates in a ridiculous bidding war at a mock livestock auction.)
As artificial as its setup might have been, Frontier House packed in lots of information about rarely discussed aspects of pioneer life. Participants—and, by extension, viewers—got genuinely illuminating crash courses in, for instance, 19th century contraception and how frontier women handled menstruation. Back to the Frontier has a few experts, historian Dr. Jacob K. Friefeld and “modern homestead” influencer Melissa K. Norris, on hand to dispense occasional tidbits of relevant info. But, to its detriment, the show isn’t as frank or curious as its predecessor. When you consider how much mileage it gets out of cast members’ disgust at human and animal waste, its avoidance of reproductive-health issues in particular suggests a post-Roe squeamishness about birth control and women’s bodies. Magnolia may not be openly courting the trad contingent, but it’s certainly taken measures to avoid alienating that audience.
Back to the Frontier comes alive in the moments when pioneer problems are met with contemporary flexibility and open-mindedness. While the moms of the cohort often fret about women’s limited autonomy in the era, we observe Jason and Joe constantly negotiating, based on skillsets rather than prescribed roles, which of them will take on each traditionally gendered task. More often, though, the focus is on reenacting the past as faithfully as possible. We’re frequently reminded, sometimes by folksy-voiced narrator William Hope, that children as young as the Hanna-Riggs boys would do farm chores from sunrise to sunset; that men bore the burden of construction, agriculture, and defense; that a mother who hadn’t cooked a delicious meal on her finicky cast-iron stove by the time everyone returned from the fields was a failure. Each new challenge is framed as a test of whether the participants could hack it in what we’re supposed to believe is a harder but somehow truer, more rewarding, and—in an assumption about the division of labor that veers disconcertingly close to essentialism—more natural world.
It’s easy for a show to make this sort of case when, like Back to the Frontier and many of its antecedents, it is transporting cast members not just back in time, but also several rungs down the economic ladder. Class-wise, the 1880s equivalents of the Halls, the Lopers, and the Hanna-Riggs would have been merchants or professionals or, at the very least, yeoman farmers, who owned land and employed laborers and maybe servants. They would not have needed to make the arduous journey west to claim the 160 acres of land guaranteed to them (if they proved they could cultivate it) by the Homestead Act of 1862. Their homes would not have been drafty, one-room shacks. They might even have enjoyed indoor plumbing. It makes you suspect the pioneers’ lawyer or shopkeeper contemporaries would have been just as frustrated on the homestead as these present-day families. To look at the situation from a different angle, a person struggling to pay bills in a 21st century United States plagued by soaring prices, stagnant wages, and a death of manufacturing jobs might rejoice at the chance to become a subsistence farmer on land they would eventually own.
Which is to say that, while it’s always easier to be rich than poor, I’m not convinced that people in the past had inherently tougher—and thus more virtuous—lives than people in the present. Problems change over time. New technology is a curse as often as it’s a blessing. Since the 19th century, progress has brought us cures for once-fatal diseases; it has also facilitated new pandemics. Workers have faced a litany of “labor-saving” innovations that threaten their livelihoods. Teens on the homestead might’ve harvested corn and mucked out chicken coops, but they didn’t lose sleep over the threat of climate apocalypse in their lifetimes.
By papering over class divisions and presenting modern life as a breeze, historical reality shows create the illusion of a purer, more honest past, as though it’s performing old-fashioned physical labor and traditional gender roles that makes us better people. Watching Back to the Frontier, it occurred to me that the specific tasks these dads, moms, and children were charged with completing, by virtue of their age or sex, were kind of immaterial. What mattered was how much they were required to stretch themselves, as individuals and as families, in order to do them. Because what really builds character is the expanded perspective that comes from inhabiting real (or real-enough) experiences that differ greatly from our own. Plunk down Little House on the Prairie’s Ingalls family in New York City ca. 2025 with a studio apartment, an iPhone, and less than $1000 in the bank, and the transformation you’d observe might be just as inspiring.
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