Netflix’s Remake of <em>Little House on the Prairie </em>Is Certainly Different Introduction to the New Little House on the Prairie Megyn Kelly, start your engines: “If you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project,” the conservative podcaster tagged Netflix last year, when the streamer’s remake of the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder story was announced. Now, as of Thursday, we have that reboot—eight episodes, with another season already on the way—sanitized in a way that’s sure to annoy Little House purists of all kinds, including the likes of Kelly. The Woke-ification of a Classic There’s no other way for me to put this: Netflix did indeed woke-ify Little House on the Prairie. This new version makes a deep bow to contemporary concerns about the politics of the source material. Some of the Ingalls family’s closest new friends on the show are an Osage couple, a Black doctor and Black storekeeper, and a French Canadian woman who wears trousers and practices free love. Laura (Alice Halsey) has a best friend who’s Osage, and her sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) isn’t blond. The show makes all these changes while still delivering a super-American, down-the-middle, borderline-Hallmark message: People of all races can be friends, family is everything, singing and dancing to your dad’s fiddle makes for a great night’s entertainment, and little babies? They’re adorable. The Story Behind the Series The Netflix series covers the events of the Little House on the Prairie novel published in 1935, which tells the story of the family’s year living near Independence, Kansas. This phase of the Ingalls family’s saga is great for television, because it’s full of incident: Ma gets her foot smashed while helping Pa build the cabin. The whole family suffers from malaria. A neighbor who’s helping dig a well passes out after failing to check for poisonous gases. Prairie fires threaten the Ingalls homestead. The Osage pass by the cabin in big groups, and one time, a few of them come in without invitation, while Pa’s away. Changes to the Original Story Although Laura Ingalls was smaller during this year than she’s represented as on the show (4 to 5 years old, as opposed to Netflix’s tweenager), that time made a lasting impression. As Caroline Fraser summed it up in her Pulitzer-winning 2017 biography of the writer, the year in Kansas “shaped Laura’s temperament and outlook for the rest of her life. That year made her who she was.” Her fascination with the prairie and its Osage inhabitants; her nearly blind love for her father; Laura’s growing feeling that she was the “wild” one and her sister Mary was the “good” one—you can see it all in this novel, which is why many of its events are likely what come right to mind when you think “Little House,” even with the series’ total of nine books spanning Laura’s life. Netflix’s Take on the Classic Netflix’s take, with its young and beautiful Ingalls parents, sassy and resourceful Ingalls sisters, and full cast of multicultural Ingalls friends, is undeniably a crowd-pleaser. It will appeal to many with its handsome cast and fun scenes of square dancing, but it also saps the story of the odd qualities that make it so memorable. Wilder was grown when she wrote the novels, but they feel made up of scattered indelible core memories, retained by a child who barely understands her parents, but still worships them—even when they make very big mistakes, as her father, Charles Ingalls, did during this year in Kansas. The Real Ingalls Family One-star Goodreads reviews of Fraser’s excellent biography are often written by people who love Pa, and can’t stand how she depicts him: a charming but feckless man who drags his family from pillar to post, defaulting on mortgages, trying again and again to farm and never succeeding. The Ingallses, Fraser shows with ample reference to the historical record, were not just roughing it, as all pioneers might—they were poor. “They would never recover the economic ground lost in Kansas” when Charles ill-advisedly claimed a patch of prairie, built a house, and cultivated land that he wasn’t able to keep in the wake of the government’s recategorization of its status, Fraser writes. Comparison to the Original The Netflix adaptation does show some of this familial stress, as Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and Charles (Luke Bracey) worry over money, but the two of them, in a very modern egalitarian fashion, always hug and resolve to “figure it out together.” And then there’s the fact that, in the show’s telling, the family leaves Wisconsin and their relatives because of a tragedy and a falling-out—an embellishment that lifts much of the blame for the failed move from Charles’ shoulders. As in the Michael Landon Little House series from the 1970s and 1980s (which has been a huge streaming hit for Peacock in recent years), Charles is hot and charismatic, a daughter’s memory of a beloved father instead of a real person. The Osage in the New Series The biggest departure from the source material is the role of the Osage, who, in the book, are an object of Laura’s fascination, a symbol of the wild nature of the land they must (through, Laura perceives, no fault of the settlers) inevitably leave. A very memorable episode in the novel has Laura watching a line of Osage traversing a trail by the cabin and coveting their babies, begging her father to “get” her one. In Netflix’s show, instead, Laura befriends Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), a similarly aged daughter of an Osage couple, Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) and White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), who were educated in a white-run school for Native children in Minnesota and live away from their tribe in a nearby cabin. Conclusion and Final Thoughts Yes, Netflix’s Ingalls family are good people, even by 2026 standards, and you can see it in contrast with the Jameses. The Jameses are town-dwelling rich folk who don’t appear in the Little House books, but seem to be an adaptation of the Oleson family. The show also gets an “F” on the “muddy streets of Deadwood” test I mentally apply to any historical media—Independence’s byways and alleys, like the avenues of New York in The Gilded Age, are perfectly clean, strewn with straw, zero manure. In fact, things were going so well for everyone around Episode 7—the Jameses brought down a peg by Caroline’s organizing talents and Mary’s skill with a sampler; Mary falling in love with the show invention Caleb (Kowen Cadorath), a boy who works at the general store; Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims) and the storekeeper Emily (Barrett Doss) paired up; the prairie fire that approaches the town averted by the hand of God—I wondered whether Netflix would let the Ingallses stay in Independence for a second season with these friends. That would have been the ultimate betrayal of the books, which are inherently episodic, based as they are on the story of a family that moved around every couple of years. But no—after tragedy, the Ingallses must leave, perched in their wagon, singing their songs. It’s a surprisingly upsetting end, for a show that tries so hard to satisfy. Source: WorldNewsAPI | Read original
