So loaded is this iconography that the very existence of Netflix’s heavily promoted Little House on the Prairie reboot, whose first season is now streaming, might suggest conservative pandering. Yet the series’ creator, Rebecca Sonnenshine, makes it clear from the beginning that she is determined to take her retelling in the opposite direction. Within its first 10 minutes, the show introduces the Ingallses to a helpful Black doctor (based on a real person who also appears in the book) and a Native American family much like themselves. These characters become the conscience of a volatile community in this solidly built adaptation, which takes admirable care in depicting a wild girlhood on stolen land but leaves little room for joy.
Wren Zhawenim Gotts, left, and Alice Halsey in Little House on the Prairie —Eric Zachanowich—Netflix
Although the U.S. government has yet to finalize its purchase of this Kansas territory from the Osage, settlers are already building out the town of Independence. Ambivalent about leaving Wisconsin, Caroline is befriended by the officious Jemma James (Mary Holland), whose husband, Eli (Michael Hough), is a railroad man. This self-anointed first couple of Independence represents traditional, white America, looking to reproduce its institutions and values and racism and xenophobia in the West. Their Victorian house looks preposterous in this dusty hamlet.
Barrett Doss, left, and Jocko Sims in Little House on the Prairie —Eric Zachanowich—Netflix
It would be irresponsible, if not impossible, to recreate the apparently apolitical Little House I grew up with as recently as the 1990s, when girls passed the books around elementary school classrooms and fell asleep watching reruns of the show on sick days. Necessary reckonings have pulled the deepest wounds of American history to the surface, fracturing the public into factions of the wronged, the guilty, and those in hysterical denial. The Wilder family was, itself, explicitly political. The Libertarian Party presidential candidate Roger MacBride, a protégé of Laura’s daughter and collaborator Rose Wilder Lane, inherited Wilder’s estate.
But for all the many fiddle-led family sing-alongs that comprise perhaps its greatest concession to the trad crowd, the series feels a bit flat. Too many characters come across as generic nice people, leaving the Jameses to entertain us with their priggish behavior (and they’ve got nothing on the original show’s iconically bratty Nellie Oleson). Episodes like the Christmas-set “Peace on Earth” can get so wrapped up in beatifying the Ingallses, with moralizing monologues and wordless moments of wonder, that they drag. Although it’s been updated for the streaming era with a serialized plot and revisionist overtones, this Little House suffers from the same cloying excesses as its predecessor. More childlike mischief might’ve helped. Yet instead of contorting the Ingallses into the people we wish they’d been, maybe it’s simply time we acknowledge that theirs may not be the enduring story we once imagined it to be.
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