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Customer Reviews of Manor House

The best reality show
I watched all six hours of this television program on PBS, and it changed my entire outlook on reality programming. The show places a group of peolple in a giant Edwardian Manor, and they have to act as if the last hundred years never happened. The main conflicts in this series arise from the social status between the master family (upstairs) and the servants (downstairs).

This series was not only educational, but very entertaining and different. Especially if you are even slightly interested in the British culture at that time. I would not recommend this, however, for people with really short attention spans.

If you ever get tired of The Bachelor or American Idol, or any other reality program, give this a try. It is worth every penny.

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MR. EDGAR RULES!
MANOR HOUSE is probably the best reality show I've ever seen. So well-cast, so loaded with real social meaning, and full of the kind of tension that recent REAL WORLD incarnations could only hope and pray for. (Even if I had no interest in history, my interest in gossip could keep me watching these people circling each other for hours.) It's also more provocative in many ways than game-based reality programming, because it FEELS like there is a game going on in MANOR HOUSE all the time. You leave the show with a creepy sense of how much "play" there is involved in any kind of social living. It's also fascinating to see how hard those who benefit from social imbalance work to justify what is, in essence, just good luck.

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Fascinating!
At the beginning of the show, Anna Oliff-Cooper describes her life as a busy doctor. She seems like the ultimate professional woman, juggling the demands of career and family.
The Oliff-Coopers (Anna, her sister, her sons, and her stuffy husband John) enter the Manor House playing the "aristocrats" and soon enough, this loving mother and doctor becomes lazy and vain. She never sees her children and doesnt care. She and her husband spend all day planning lavish balls, meeting Important People, and worrying about clothes and fashions. Meanwhile, the servants work 18 hour days, exhausted and resentful.
This is "reality tv" at its best, and like all good reality tv, the situations feel real enough to be uncomfortable. PBS's "Fronteir House" showed a disintegration of a family and a petty but vicious frontier feud. "Manor House" has even more memorable characters, including the pompous John Oliff-Cooper, who is soon spouting silly theories about social darwinism. Sir Edgar is the stern but softhearted butler, who at first sides with his masters, but ends up identifying intensely with the downstairs servants. There's an Indian tutor who is shunned by both the downstairs servants for his snobbery and the upstairs family for, well, his being a tutor. There's even a downstairs romance between the scullery maid and the hall boy. A sympathetic Edgar knows abot the romance (which would have been strictly forbidden) but looks the other way.
In the end, upstairs and downstairs look more even than one would imagine. The Oliff-Coopers are indolent, but not really happy -- their small son soon considers the downstairs servants more like family. Anna's sister is so unhappy she leaves the house. The downstairs servants fight but also bond tightly.
Overall, this was a wonderful series.