They weren't marooned on a desert island, but the plucky Bowler family -- Paul, Joyce, 17-year-old Kathryn, 11-year-old twins Hilary and Ruth and 9-year-old Joe -- may as well have been. They had no phone (except for one in a locked room, to be used only in case of fire or medical emergency), no car, no TV, no fast food, no computer, no emollients. They did have whalebone corsets, chamber pots, toy soldiers made out of lead, bicarbonate of soda instead of toothpaste, a straight razor instead of a Gillette and a lovely, dusty sitting room.

In the first episode, the house was restored and the Bowlers were plucked from suburban obscurity and given instructions in how to light gas lamps, lace up corsets and keep the combination kitchen stove/boiler going. In episode two, "A Rude Awakening" (running Monday at 9 p.m.; check local PBS listings), the Bowlers move in, brought to their new home in a horse-drawn carriage while their curious neighbors line the sidewalk. After the giddiness wears off, reality hits. As the series unfolds, Paul cuts his face to ribbons with the straight razor, Joe refuses to eat the bland, gloppy food and the stove doesn't make enough heat to provide hot water for baths or to cook food all the way through. Joyce and Kathryn have to make their own sanitary napkins out of cloth "folded like nappies," because tampons weren't invented until the 1920s. A Maytag-less laundry day is a harrowing affair that involves boiling the clothes, agitating them by hand and putting them through a ringer; Joyce's hands are rubbed raw when it's done. (Take that, you "Survivor" panty-waists!)

By the middle of the second episode, the usually cool-headed and dryly witty Joyce is having a meltdown; she storms out into the garden after fixing another disastrous dinner (it's very hard to be a 1990s vegetarian in Victorian Britain) and screams at Paul about her "three rotten days" in the 1900 House. Then one of the twins sneaks off to tell the video camera that "Mum and Dad are shouting at each other ... If they don't just grow up, I don't know what we're going to do!" And comely Kathryn reaches her breaking point, too, over the lack of hot water and the disgusting, waxy, homemade shampoo she has to use. "I'm fed up with being dirty and smelly and greasy and skanky!" she whines to the video diary camera. Indeed, it's not long before the Bowler women sneak one unauthorized purchase -- a bottle of shampoo -- into their basket at the grocery store.

"The 1900 House" is classy voyeurism; it owes less to "Survivor" than it does to that seminal PBS reality series "An American Family" -- in which the social upheaval of the early '70s quietly tore an upper-middle-class suburban family apart before we even realized what was happening. Watching "The 1900 House," you get a vivid sense of the drudgery of life at the turn-of-the-century and the desperation that launched a thousand modern inventions. But more than that, you're transfixed by the Bowler family dynamics, by the mood swings of a family under pressure from without and within. They start out a nice, cheery, close-knit bunch, full of good humor and adventurous spirit. School inspector Joyce volunteered them for the project because she wanted to "time travel" back to her great-grandmothers' era, and Paul, a telecommunications specialist with the Royal Marines, went along like a good sport as "payback" for Joyce's putting up with the constant relocating his career demands.

But as Joyce bears the brunt of the domestic hardship in the 1900 House, she comes to realize what it means to be "stuck in a boring, mind-numbingly boring existence," and her frustration casts a pall over the household. Having agreed to take a leave of absence from her job for the duration of the series (because a turn-of-the-century woman of her class would not have worked outside the home), Joyce laments the "wasted talent and brainpower" of Victorian women. "This whole experience has just taken me up and it's shaken me right to the core of my being!," she cries.

Joyce snaps at Paul, begins researching the women's suffrage movement, buys a bicycle to gain some freedom and admits that she resents her husband for being able to leave the house and go to work every day (albeit, in a Victorian-era Royal Marine uniform). She also finds a small but satisfying way to rebel against the constraints of her prim and proper clothing. "I'm not wearing any drawers," she tells the video camera matter-of-factly. "I don't think Victorian women would have worn them every day. It would have been too much to wash."

Paul, for his part, seems to enjoy his role as master of the house. He's too much of a modern nice guy to lord over his wife and children, but he scarily role-plays the class superiority thing in his dealings with Elizabeth, the scrappy "maid of all work" Joyce has hired (in keeping with the practices of middle-class women of the time). Elizabeth is a saucy supporting player and tells the camera in no uncertain terms that she thinks Paul is a big jerk.

The most affecting part of "The 1900 House" is watching the Bowlers come together and make the best of their stay. Paul gives Joyce a sweet birthday surprise, the twins throw themselves into Victorian girl activities, like making puppet shows and taking photographs with a turn-of-the-century camera, and Kathryn, forced into the tedium of being an ornamental young lady of 1900, eventually learns to laugh at her imprisonment, becoming her mother's confidante and a budding suffragette. "We didn't realize our children were this confident or this resourceful," says Joyce, with pride and wonder. "I'm seeing them in a completely different light."

But in this summer of "Survivor," what really stays with you about "The 1900 House" is the lesson the Bowlers learn about the difference between true hardship and mere artifice. The Bowlers were not actors playing around on a set decorated with Martha Stewart Victoriana. They slipped into their ancestors' skins and felt Victorian society literally suffocating and chafing them, and their experience makes you understand why life, particularly for women, had to change. "It's not romantic. It's dirty. It's hard work," says Joyce. What did the Bowlers win for their three months of "primitive" living? Not a million dollars. Not anything material at all. But something else: "We take so much for granted these days, we don't actually realize how much has happened in the last hundred years," Joyce says. "For me, nothing will ever be the same again."

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