“If you knew what you were getting into, would you do it again?” That question was recently posed to me by one of the producers of the PBS series Colonial House, after I had just completed more than a year as a lead consultant for the show. A follow-up to such popular shows as Frontier House and Manor House, the series is an effort to blend reality television with history. A group of modern day “colonists” spent four months of 2003 experiencing the life of settlers in 1628 Maine. The colonists undertook a crash course in seventeenth-century living, were provided with historically accurate food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities, and had to carve out a colony on the harsh and unforgiving shores of a new land. They were filmed regularly, and the result was an eight-hour series that premiered May 17.