Back to the Frontier Will Remind You of Something
Magnolia Network’s new reality series Back to the Frontier promises to be a spin on a familiar reality-show model — part social experiment like Love Is Blind or Survivor, part extreme lifestyle voyeurism like Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch, and part gamified survivalism like Alone or Naked and Afraid or, again, Survivor. The idea is that several representative American families will give up all their modern-day comforts and experience a summer exactly like an 1880s American frontiersman. They’ll be forced to farm their own food, support and maintain their homesteads, and live together in one-room cabins without running water, electricity, or caffeine (this is the cruelest part).
The idea is a good one, and it’s a space TV has tried out before in shows like Colonial House. Unfortunately, the execution of that idea is unforgivably underwhelming. The frontier settlers arrive without even the slightest demonstration that they know what life in the 19th century was actually like, leaving them shocked by things like outhouses and wood-burning stoves. Their houses come pre-stocked with canned goods, instruction manuals for frontier life, cash for the general store, and beautifully tended kitchen gardens, making the whole “experiment” appear frictionless and completely without consequences. (The fact that all three family participants include underage kids also acts as a “none of the risks are real” sign plastered over the whole thing.) Back to the Frontier looks like many, many things, but none of those things is at all like going back to the frontier. Here, instead, are several more accurate comparisons:
An adaptation of Stardew Valley. The houses have holes in the walls but also come with canvases that are conveniently exactly the size of the holes. The gardens are laid out in neat vertical rows, with crops carefully chosen to supply exactly what they might need and a book of recipes that just so happens to match what they’ve harvested. It’s not hard to believe that if they constructed a simple fishing line, they might come up with a pre-stocked trout!
A less funny remake of The Simple Life. Because the contestants of this show react to Middle America and the concept of the 19th century like it’s all a Lynchian fever dream, their disbelief that they won’t have running water is enough to make you wonder what these people thought they signed up for. Or whether they’ve ever seen a single movie set before 1950.
Theme-park spinoff of a Taylor Sheridan show. You, too, can set out in a wagon with your whole family and experience the hardships of 19th-century American life! Uh, let’s not think too closely about why we all feel so driven to be here in this remote prairie.
Budget summer camp. Child care is very expensive. Vacations are very expensive. People pay for exclusive digital detoxes like this. Why not have production pay you instead?
Photo shoot for a series of Christian historical-fiction novels. Although Back to the Frontier is not interested in the mechanics of how these people were initially stocked with all their goods or where their fresh bread came from, it is invested in lots of footage of people walking through beautiful fields, silhouetted against the horizon, with a slightly desaturated color palette and an aesthetically pleasing out-of-focus tree in the background.
Target ad. If you look close enough, surely you can spot some of Joanna and Chip Gaines’s Hearth & Hand with Magnolia items, exclusive to Target!, in these cabins.
Immersive family seminar based on Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Although there’s very little concern about things like disease, racism, misogyny, or other perils of historical living, there’s a lot of worry about the dangers of contemporary life — namely, phones. These people want to give their children an experience! And that experience is no screens. (Whether there’s also no penicillin is unclear.)
Anti-vaxx convention. Self-explanatory.
Lifetime TV version of Meek’s Cutoff. What if Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 film starring Michelle Williams as a settler who finds her voice to defend a Native man against bloodthirsty white guys lacked nuance or intentionality in its depiction of the cruelness of American expansion and was just, like, a way to kill time while folding laundry?
AP U.S. History textbook as approved by the state of Texas. It’s historically flavored, certainly, and there are facts that float around, but there’s not much grounding in … the course of human events? Or major political conflict, or anything other than the idea that pioneers are occupying blank space that’s available for the taking. It’s also interesting that although one of the participating families is Black, the racial element of this historical experiment somehow never comes up in the first several episodes.
Modern-homesteader YouTube-content house. Oh, sure, you could go out into a field and take videos of just you, alone, harvesting things you’re pretty sure are beets. But it’s so much better when you can also talk about how important this is for your family! Or to have a spouse there who can taste the vegetable soup you made!
Airbnb investment property for tradwives. Because if there’s one thing a 2025 tradwife is going to do, it’s romanticize the past for people who really, really don’t know any better.
Exciting new co-working start-up. What is a farming community, after all, if not a communal support system for your grind-set mind-set?