Two historians of 20th century domesticity in Canada give you the dish on CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner!
Welcome back to part three of our mini-series reviewing CBC’s new show, Back in Time for Dinner!
Andrea’s Review
My short-lived career as a ballerina. No clue what I’m doing here.
Well, we’ve come to the end of the (first season?) of CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner. So, in my final review of this show, I’d like to reflect on the most recent episode as well as the whole series.
Generally speaking, I think that this episode was an improvement over the 1980s. Whether that’s because I was a teenager in the 90s, because the show’s producers had more to work with in terms of their own memories, or due to some other factor, I have no idea. While significant parts of this week’s episode felt really foreign to me (who in the world had a living room that looked like that?), it was fun to travel down memory lane. I played computer games at camp on the same iMac computer, ate waaaaay too many bagel bites, watched Fashion Television, and vaguely worried over Y2K. And, once again, my favourite part of the episode (and the series), hands down, was the Campus family. They were absolutely delightful. Tristan is a gem, the kids are hilarious and down to earth, and Aaron is adorable. I often felt that they had a much better handle on the nuances of history than the producers of the show did.
At the same time, the episode was plagued by the same problems that popped up in every other episode. I did not get the whole “lifestyle” angle, since we all know that you needed a degree in mechanical engineering to do any of Martha Stewart’s DIY projects. I am still confused about why the show paid so much attention to the OJ Simpson chase, and so little to the 1995 Quebec Referendum. I have no idea why they left out the 1998 Ice Storm or the introduction of the Toonie (remember when the middle used to fall out?). Also, was line dancing really a bigger deal than the macarena?
But one part of the episode has really stuck out in my head, and that’s the very traditional discussion at the end about what the family has learned from their experience. With few exceptions, the individuals involved in these types of shows say that 1) we need to learn to be grateful for what we have in the present and 2) the past has made them better appreciate the importance of family togetherness and time away from screens. But this kind of attitude doesn’t really work for me anymore.
First of all, I should state that I tend to agree with the view that we should be grateful for living in the present. You know, ‘cause we have things like antibiotics (for now….). And most historians that I know, if offered the chance to go back in time to the era of their choosing, would decline. However, I do take issue with the underlying assumption behind this view, that history moves in a straight line from bad to better. Because it doesn’t. Rather, it is more accurate to instead say that history moves in waves and cycles. Take the issue of women’s rights, for example. Women in the 1920s had many more sexual freedoms than women in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1920s was the era of the flapper, short hair, short(ish) skirts, and short amounts of patience with existing gender norms (ok, I had to stretch to make this sentence work). So while I would definitely agree that we’re better off now than we were in the 1950s, are we really better off than we were before the 2008 economic crash?
Second, the idea that, somehow, people in the past had better and closer relationships, particularly with family, than we do today is complete nonsense. This assumption is based on the romanticization of the past, the idea that there was a ‘golden age’ of family togetherness and happiness, and that the advent of the internet has somehow ruined family life. That internet, giving young people ideas. This is based on a notion of what an idealized family meant in the 1950s: heterosexual, middle-class, and white. While we tend to think of this as a “traditional” family, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, it’s a total blip. For most of human history, the meaning of family has been fluid and dynamic. It was totally normal in much of settler Canada for married children to live with their parents, for instance. What’s more, families aren’t necessarily happy or even healthy. Domestic abuse and family violence was, and is, frighteningly common. Finally, I really don’t buy this whole idea that digital technology somehow destroyed our ability to relate to human beings. In fact, if it wasn’t for the internet, I would never have been able to connect with all of you wonderful people, and my life would be all the poorer for it!
To my mind, the most important lesson that we should take away from these types of shows is that history is messy, complicated, hilarious, depressing, and, above all, human. That people have always tried to live the best lives that they could, even when their options were limited.
While it’s all well and good to point out the problems here, as a good friend of mine noted, it’s also important to offer potential solutions. Probably the most obvious would be for the producers of Back in Time for Dinner to hire a professional historian. Note that I’m not saying that they need to hire an academic historian. But, rather, I think the show would have benefited tremendously from having someone on the research or production team that had a solid background in both the subject matter as well as the mechanics of history and historical memory. As I’ve discussed previously, there is an important difference between historians and history buffs. Many people think that history is something that anyone can do, but it’s much more about the human condition and how people understand the past than it is having an encyclopedic knowledge of a particular time period. The adage is annoying but true: if you would hire a plumber to fix a leaking pipe, shouldn’t you hire a historian to do history?
Second, I think the show would have done better to focus on one decade, rather than trying to cram sixty years into six forty-three-minute episodes. It’s just not possible to meaningfully examine each decade in such a short time frame. But if it had to be done, it would have been a better idea to focus either on food or on culture and society, rather than both. To my mind, the show would have been much less uneven and confusing that way.
Third, embrace the mess. History is messy and complicated because people are messy and complicated. And I think that many people, like the Campus family, have aptly demonstrated that they are able to understand this. Maybe give your audience the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their intelligence and capacity for understanding complex ideas. A show like Back in Time for Dinner would have been a great opportunity to talk about the differences (and intersections) between nostalgia, history, the past, and historical memory.
I would echo here Douglas McCalla’s words, with respect to “Pioneer Quest,”
To conclude, I return to simplicity. Those who stress it take for granted all that was actually involved in making a new society. The producers of a television series have the excuse that they need a form appropriate to their medium. In isolating their central figures in order to shape their drama, however, they create an essentially unreal situation by denying the characters the context in which settlement actually took place, that is, the networks connecting people to one another, within families, communities, and the wider economy and through generations. [Those] who stress simplicity are in fact setting up a stylized “before” to compare with an “after” that is the main interest, in a future that the pioneers could not know. If we set the pioneers instead into the context of their own era, the world they made had all the complexity of human lives. Understanding them in their own terms, and making sense of that world, make a richly challenging problématique, with immense capacity to engage students and scholars in several disciplines. – Douglas McCalla, “‘It was [not] a simpler time’”: Towards a New Economic History of Canadian Settlement” (Thanks to Kesia for the reference!)
All in all, this has been an interesting experience. And I’ll just leave it at that. 🙂
Kesia’s Review
The main question I have after the 90s episode is why exactly they kept coming back to the 90s as a decade characterized by an emphasis on comfort and family life and a focus on the home. Rota’s narration did not offer much in the way of explanation for this and I am still curious about why this was happening. Mostly, the episode felt both familiar and foreign to me, which I think I can probably link to growing up in a rural area and being part of a very young family in the 90s. Unlike Andrea, I remember several country chic living rooms. But that likely has more to do with growing up in the country where that kind of aesthetic appealed to people. This has been a recurring problem with the show, suggesting that there was one set decorating style for each decade with no change from the beginning to end of it.
The food certainly seemed a lot more familiar to me this episode. I remember a lot of food that came from the freezer, but not all of it was bought pre-made. My mom told me that things were not easy for our young family in the 90s and food was all about budgeting. We had what was cheap and filling. This meant buying ground beef for casseroles, mac and cheese made with Cheese Whiz, and using cheaper cuts of chicken. My parents made a lot of meals and froze them (what I guess we would now call meal prep) for dinner later in the month. Again, food is very much tied to a family’s economic situation. I also remember the 90s being filled with a lot of pot-luck dinners. The idea of a fancy at home dinner with guests coming entirely empty-handed is so foreign to me; people offer to bring things! A dinner party like the Campuses hosted seems like something that young couples without children would do. I liked that the family went out for a buffet as I definitely remember buffets being one of the few things we would eat out at, especially Chinese Buffet. Often we called buffets “Schmorgesborg” because we were in a primarily Scandinavian area. So, all in all, the food seemed pretty familiar, even though the show continued to ignore a lot of context of which people were engaging in what food trends.
I had so much hope for this series. Perhaps I was only going to be disappointed after watching the most recent BBC version. Given that this series is based off the BBC’s “Back in Time for …” the CBC had a good formula to go off of, which makes the series all the more disappointing. That is not to say that everything about the series was sub-par; on the whole there were some great and entertaining moments, which I suppose is the point of this type of reality programming. I love the possibilities that historical TV shows, narrative, documentary, or reality, offer for education, but I have a feeling that the CBC has been a bit scared of creating any kind of historical programming that somehow challenges the viewers’ perceptions of the past since the “The Valour and Horror” incident. This is probably why Back in Time for Dinner fell so short as far as acknowledging the complexity of Canada’s past and Canadian identity.
I think a lot of the issues we have noted over the series could have been fixed by hiring a Canadian Food Historian. Seriously, there are several precariously employed Canadian food historians I know who would have been amazing leads for the research team. (I know that their lead show advisor has a PhD, but as far as I could find out, its in literature/English.) The show left me with the feeling that there was a lot of surface level research done within a short time frame, especially in the last few episodes. Because there is a lack of historical research done on the 70s-90s in Canada, it was the responsibility of the research team to think more critically about each decade from a historical perspective themselves. Much of the time I felt like I was watching a food program at a living history site that fell short because the interpreters who wrote it didn’t have access to academic library sources and didn’t do enough research to add context. Fortunately, the very existence of this program gives me hope that my future “I want to be a historical consultant for TV and film” plans might not be impossible, and is frankly very needed. It may just take a bit of convincing for production companies and networks to see the value of employing professional historians as more than just talking heads. Or maybe we need more historians pitching shows themselves. (Seriously this is yet another “history” CBC program that just doesn’t do quite enough. There was a particularly angering episode of Frankie Drake last year that revolved around a kitchen during WWI and I don’t think I have never been so angry at a show that is already questionable for accuracy as far as historical setting goes… And don’t even get me started on When Calls the Heart.)
There are good historical programs out there, as we’ve discussed previously, and it is possible for “Back in Time for Dinner” to redeem itself if it continues. However, they will need to do a lot of work to add the necessary historical context into the show. First, they need to hire a historian that appears in every episode, on screen, to accompany Rota and set up each era for the family. Second, I think that it is incredibly important that we know where the show is taking place. Local context matters, and frankly it would be far more interesting to create a series that is planning to continue by moving around the country to different locations and demographics. It would be interesting to see what life was like for Italian immigrants to Toronto in different eras, or for Jewish families in Montreal, or a farmers in Western Canada.
Next, they need to consider the importance of class and family economics as a whole in each decade. Canadians have a tendency to paint ourselves as solidly middle-class, no matter what our actual economic situation is. It is important to think about how people could afford the domestic and consumer goods that they were featuring on Back in Time for Dinner. Did a family buy on credit or pay in installments? Relatedly, I think that it is important that the idea of neatly organized episodes based on decades is abandoned in order to better show continuity and change in an appropriate way. This moving through the decade style didn’t really work, as nothing truly seemed to change from 1960 to 1969 because the context that explains why things were changing or not was never really discussed. It makes more sense to organize episodes against the backdrop of major political, economic, and cultural shifts. And those don’t tend to fit into nicely packaged decades.
Additionally, I think that family life cycle is something that should be addressed on occasion. The Campus children were all over 15 when the show was filmed. The age of the children matters a great deal here and would impact the family’s life differently in each decade. A family with infants and toddlers in 1990 lived a very different decade than a family with teenagers just as 18 in 1942 was not the same as 18 in 1982. Finally, I think that the show needed to more consistently address the impact of important Canadian events on daily life. I’m fine with the featuring of larger world/American events and culture, but it is necessary to engage in a discussion about how different forms of media and technology and access to them impacted the importance of those broader events to Canadians.
Kesia eating 90s food! Click to Embiggen.
My final words here will be about food, as the intention of Back in Time for Dinner is to focus on food in the home. First, I need to compliment Tristan for being such a boss and cooking so many unfamiliar dishes on top of not really being a skilled cook. I liked seeing her confidence grow. I would also like to give some props to the research team for featuring some good recipes. Some were very clearly there to add humour and drama to the show, and the food generally didn’t disappoint as far as entertainment value was concerned. However, I will say that the food was best when they weren’t featuring gimmicky foods that may or may not have been consumed by the average family. I think that instead of focusing on what was actually consumed by a family like the Campuses in different eras (particularly from the 70s-90s) the show gave in to the temptation to have the family cook things that were just barely starting to take off in those decades. It is entirely possible that many food trends were being featured in the media because they were oddities for a lot of people. The gimmicky foods can be fun – but there needed to be more of a balance.
Overall, I think I just really wanted more from the food. I wanted to know more about what was driving the changes in food at home; more than just the occasional mention of Chatelaine, the Food Guide, and a TV show. Recent exhibits put on by the University of Guelph’s Archival and Special Collections and the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library have featured important Canadian cookbooks and it is clear that some of the recipes featured in the show were drawn from these books. But there was no discussion about these important books on the show! Instead the recipes just materialized. I think mentioning these sources is important because the kinds of cooking featured in on Back in Time For Dinner was focused on change and newness. These recipes had to have come from somewhere!
Back in Time in Dinner had the potential to be both a fun and educational program, but the people in charge seem to have gone almost exclusively for entertainment value. They chose to ignore important events and context in favour of featuring trends at face value, giving me the impression the show was created by amateur instead of professional historians. The good news is that there is room for improvement! Hopefully, if Back in Time for Dinner returns to our screens for another season, there will be more consideration for the complexity of the past.
We hope you enjoyed the final review of CBC’s Back in Time for Dinner, as well as the entire series! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Friday for Stephanie’s list of upcoming publications for August 2018! See you then!
See our reviews of previous episodes:
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