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Time Magazine
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Why Is Reality TV Obsessed With Going 'Back to the Frontier?'
'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. 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.
USA Today
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Why Joanna Gaines cried over frontier reality series: 'I'm not a crier, but I felt it'
When Joanna Gaines arrived on the set of her new reality TV series, which transports three families on horse and buggy to the 1880s, tears spilled down her cheeks. Four weeks into the experiment in giving up modern comforts like electricity, an indoor bathroom and even toilet paper, families on 'Back to the Frontier' (Thursdays, 8 ET/PT on Magnolia Network and streaming on HBO Max) began thriving. They did 'Mini Reni's on their cabins, set on 10,000 acres near the Rocky Mountains, maintained their own gardens and learned how to cook on a wood-burning stove. 'I'm not a crier, but I felt it,' Joanna says of the eight-episode project, which she produced with husband Chip Gaines. 'I felt this sense of peace; I felt home. The idea that these three families got out of their busy rut and got to have this experience of eight weeks together going through the hard, going through the beautiful, it was like this spiritual experience that I felt for these families.' While 'Back to the Frontier' might remind you of CBS' 25-year-old reality series 'Survivor,' it's not a competition series. Instead of a cash prize, participants walk away with the experience, the way it changes their families and newfound resiliency and knowledge. And boy, are they proud. The families excitedly showed off their handmade projects during Chip and Joanna's set visit and introduced their chickens. (The Gaineses do not appear on "Back to the Frontier.") 'It felt like Christmas,' Chip says, 'in the sense that when you're dragging somebody to see this thing that I got.' 'Our lives these days aren't conducive to that sometimes − the slowing down, the learning, the doing the hard − we all kind of try to push that away," Joanna says. "So the fact that these families really have no choice but to face this head on and then create this beauty out of the challenge … I left going, 'This is such a special experience.'' But the experience was understandably not free from obstacles. It took time for the Lopers from Alabama, the Hanna-Riggs from Texas and the Hall family from Florida to adjust to life on the frontier, 'because for the first four weeks it was that detox,' Joanna says. 'It was that uncomfortableness, that 'Where do we fit here?' And finally that broke, and now they were getting into their stride and they were getting confident and they started feeling at home.' Stacey Loper, a mom who arrived toting a Louis Vuitton bag, struggled with the outhouse and lack of indoor plumbing. The women of the Hall family – mom Lina and her daughters, Mia and Zoe – were reluctant to surrender their makeup. Lina cried, her beauty products serving as a security blanket of sorts. 'As a man, I got teary eyed when those three women − obviously the young girls and then the mom − were like, 'Wait, no makeup?'" Chip says. "And at first, they kind of thought, 'Oh, this is funny. Maybe it's a joke,' or however, they were reacting at first. But then when she started kind of working through like, 'Am I confident enough to be out here … without makeup?'' 'I think for women,' Joanna adds, 'when you take that away, it's like, 'Wow, I'm down to the rawest version of myself emotionally, physically, spiritually, on every level.'" But without the things you rely on, like makeup or technology, you're forced to grow, and that's where the magic of the series happens. Joanna says sometimes at home she and Chip put their phones away for the weekend. There's the hour of ''Well now what do I do?'' she says. But then the options open up. 'You can do something in the garden. You can make something. You start getting creative and curious again,' she says. 'This idea of like, how capable we are as humans, you just don't know that until you're sometimes forced into that.' 'Back to the Frontier' won't likely inspire viewers to 'go to the Rocky Mountains and live somewhere for eight weeks as a family with cameras around,' Joanna acknowledges, as Chip laughs. 'But if it means on a Sunday, put your phones up and let's see what we can create together. Let's see what we can do together. Even if it's just one day, just that impact could be huge for families.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New Show Challenges Families to Live Like 'Little House on the Prairie's Laura Ingalls Wilder
New Show Challenges Families to Live Like 'Little House on the Prairie's Laura Ingalls Wilder originally appeared on Parade. Back to the Frontier, a new reality series executive produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines, challenged families to live like Little House on the Prairie's . On July 10, the Magnolia Network and Max show will follow three American families—The Lopers (Alabama), Hanna-Riggs (Texas) and Halls (Florida)—as they ditch modern-day comforts of the 21st century for a life as 1880s homesteaders. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 'This series taps into something we've always believed–that stepping away from the noise of everyday life can bring you closer to what matters most,' Chip and Joanna said in a news release shared with Parade. 'It is proof that no matter where you find yourself, the most important part of home is the people you share it with.' For Back to the Frontier, the families lived for eight weeks on the frontier, where they had to raise livestock, collect food, ration their supplies and reinforce their shelters via the 1880s way of life. 'This exciting new series invites viewers to step back in time and experience the challenges of the American frontier,' Magnolia Network President Allison Page said in the news release. 'By immersing three families in the realities of 1880s life, we provided them—and our viewers—an authentic glimpse into the resilience and grit required to survive. Making this series has been an unforgettable journey, and we trust audiences will find it both captivating and inspiring.' New episodes of the eight-episode, produced by Wall to Wall for Magnolia Network and Max, will drop weekly. In the finale, viewers will find out whether the families would have succeeded or failed on the frontier. Back to the Frontier premieres on Max and Magnolia Network on Thursday, July 10. Next: New Show Challenges Families to Live Like 'Little House on the Prairie's Laura Ingalls Wilder first appeared on Parade on Jul 8, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 8, 2025, where it first appeared.
UPI
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- UPI
Watch: 'Back to the Frontier' trailer takes three families back to the 1800s
Reality series "Back to the Frontier" challenges three families to live like 1880s homesteaders. Photo courtesy of Max June 17 (UPI) -- Magnolia Network and Max released a trailer for Back to the Frontier, an upcoming reality series starring three families challenged to live as 1880s homesteaders. The trailer, released Tuesday, introduces the four families as they give up modern comforts like cosmetics and electronic devices and learn to live a " more analog life on the frontier." The series is executive produced by Magnolia Network founders and former Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines. "This series taps into something we've always believed -- that stepping away from the noise of everyday life can bring you closer to what matters most," Chip and Joanna Gaines said in a news release. "It is proof that no matter where you find yourself, the most important part of home is the people you share it with." Back to the Frontier premieres July 10 on Magnolia Network and Max.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Task' Teaser: Mark Ruffalo Leads Hunt for Armed Robbers in New Series From ‘Mare of Easttown' Creator (TV News Roundup)
Mark Ruffalo stars as an FBI agent tasked with solving a series of violent robberies in the new HBO drama series 'Task.' From 'Mare of Easttown' creator Brad Ingelsby, 'Task' dives into the working class suburbs of Philadelphia as Ruffalo's character puts together a crucial Task Force. The cast is rounded out by Tom Pelphrey, Emilia Jones, Jamie McShane, Sam Keeley, Thuso Mbedu, Fabien Frankel and Alison Oliver. More from Variety Mark Ruffalo, Guy Pearce, Melissa Barrera and Ralph Fiennes Among 350+ Figures to Sign Letter About Killing of Palestinian Protagonist of Cannes-Bound Doc: 'We Are Ashamed' of Industry 'Passivity' (EXCLUSIVE) Academy Apologizes for Not Naming 'No Other Land' Director Hamdan Ballal Amid Outcry From More Than 800 Voters Bong Joon Ho Knows Mark Ruffalo's 'Mickey 17' Villain Resembles Trump: 'Were We Oracles Predicting the Future?' Ingelsby directed both Kate Winslet and Julianne Nicholson to Emmy wins in 'Mare of Easttown.' 'Task' is directed and executive produced by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson-Whitfield. Additional executive producers include Ruffalo, Mark Roybal, Paul Lee, David Crockett and Ron Schmidt, while Mark Roybal and Paul Lee executive produce for wiip. Nicole Jordan-Webber and Jeremy Yaches co-executive produce for Public Record. 'Task' will debut this September on HBO with the seven episodes debuting weekly. Watch the first official teaser below. Would you be able to leave modern technology behind? Three American families will have to in the new reality series 'Back to the Frontier,' set to premiere Thursday, July 10 on Magnolia Network and Max. To live as 1880s homesteaders, each family will have to navigate life without electricity or running water throughout the eight episodes. The show is executive produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines and is one of their 'ambitious large-scale competitions' and 'out-of-the-box social experiments' intended to bring parents and children audiences together, as Variety previously reported. Check out first look images from 'Back to the Frontier' below. Gordon Ramsay's production company, Studio Ramsay Global, is launching the eight-episode documentary series 'Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars,' which will stream on Apple TV+. Set in the world of international fine dining with locations ranging from Los Angeles, Mexico City to London, the series 'follows the fates of elite chefs at some of the world's most unique and celebrated restaurants to determine if they will win, maintain or lose that precious Star,' according to an official synopsis. 'As a chef, the pursuit for perfection is everything, and you cannot underestimate the unbelievable drive and ambition, the determination and sacrifice, these chefs are going through day in and day out, chasing the dream of acknowledgment from The Michelin Guide,' Ramsay said in a statement. 'Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars' is executive produced by Ramsay, Lisa Edwards and Morgan Roberts. A release date has yet to be announced. Howard Swartz is joining Pioneer Productions as Chief Executive Officer, beginning work in the company's London headquarters. In his new role, Swartz will focus on expanding Pioneer's slate of factual content across many different genres, including feature docs, limited series and docuseries, with the goal of reaching younger audiences. 'Pioneer Productions has always stood for intelligent, ambitious, and entertaining factual content,' Swartz said in a statement. 'In the midst of this global television transformation, I'm looking forward to building a slate that honors the company's DNA while creating space for fresh voices, new topics, and formats that can entertain and inform audiences across broadcast, streaming, digital and whatever platform might come next.' Swartz brings his prior experience at Warner Bros. Discovery, where he oversaw programming for Shark Week and launched limited docuseries for Discovery like the Emmy-nominated 'Serengeti' and Emmy-nominated feature documentary 'January 6th.' Swartz left the company in 2023 to serve as EVP of production and development at Stephen David Entertainment. 'Storage Wars' is returning with more auctions and action with a premiere date set for Saturday, June 7 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The bidders are once again on the hunt for abandoned storage units to decide what they can make profitable. The official synopsis for this ten-episode season reads: 'Join the bidding frenzy as Dan and Laura Dotson take their place leading the auction as buyers compete to grab the best locker of the day. Brandi Passante, Dave Hester, Kenny Crossley, Ivy Calvin and his sons, Rene and Casey Nezhoda, Lisa Delarios, and Dusty Riach all return as buyers with one ultimate goal – to have their bid be the one to secure the win.' 'Storage Wars' is produced for A&E by Original Productions. Executive producers for Original Productions are Jeff Hasler, Brian Lovett, Jeff Bumgarner and Roman Mykytyn, while Franklin Cumberbatch and Sean Gottlieb executive produce for A&E. Bloomberg's business and sports podcast 'The Deal' has officially returned for Season 3, with guests this season including Mellody Hobson, Susie Wolff and Josh Harris. Hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly, 'The Deal' interviews major corporate titans, sports champions and entrepreneurs every week to get their insights on making deals and navigating their various industries. Previous guests include Magic Johnson, Serena Williams and Billie Jean King. This season of 'The Deal' airs Wednesdays at 6 p.m. on Bloomberg Television and 8 p.m. on Bloomberg Originals, before streaming on all podcast platforms Thursday. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
