Little House on the Prairie

We watched the new Netflix series, Little House on the Prairie this week. Like many of you, I loved the books growing up. I loved the TV series that was on in the 70s and early 80s. I have poured over the annotated Pioneer Girl, the biography Prairie Fires, and a couple of other, older biographies. I have listened to the Wilder podcast (which is going to have a new season talking about the new series!). I read some of the books written about her daughter, Rose, and I loved the story of Little House on the Prairie told from Ma’s point of view, Caroline. So when I heard that Netflix was going to have a new series, I knew I’d be watching.

This Little House is ambitious. It aims to take facts from Laura’s real life and stories from her children’s books, and weave them into a larger story about what life on the Prairie would be like, not just for the Ingalls family, but for the many people who lived there at the time. The Osage, the pioneers, the African Americans. To do this, the Ingalls family settles much closer to town. In the book (and the first episode of the original TV series), they are 40 miles outside of Independence, Kansas. In reality, they were perhaps 10-15 miles outside of town. In this series, they are much closer to town, to neighbors, to the community. This means that we get a friend for Laura, a Native girl named Good Eagle. We get to see more about Dr. Tann, the African American doctor who practiced in the area. In reality (and the book), he saved the Ingalls family when they were sick with malaria, and in reality (but not the book) he delivered their 3rd daughter, Carrie. In Little House, he is a much bigger part of their story, and has his own plot lines as well. In this Little House, they don’t give the ages of Mary and Laura, but I think Mary is a bit older than in the original series, which gives her a young man to fall for in town. (And both Laura and Mary are older than in the books, when they are about 5 and 7, or reality when they were about 3 and 5.)

I like these changes, I think it’s interesting to consider the rest of the community that lived in that time and place. At first, this series felt a little flat to me, like perhaps they are trying to do too much, and while doing so have lost some of the heart and charm of both the books and the original series (at least the excellent first episode, I don’t remember a ton of the rest of the original series). The books are full of so much of Laura’s wonder and awe for the world around her, but it’s internal, so you don’t see it as much on the screen. The scenery of the new season is beautiful though, I think it’s filmed in Manitoba. It reminded me of parts of Alaska, without the mountains. I watched the first episode of the original series on YouTube yesterday, the TV movie that encompasses the same period of time as this series, and it did a much better job of showing how absolutely alone they were, how remote and isolated and poor. In the new series, storylines are subtly different in ways that do not seem necessary to me, like when Jack the dog gets lost crossing the river, or when the family gets malaria. And in this series, there is talk of them being broke, at Christmas, but the gifts they received were pretty darned nice. The girls aren’t thrilled to their bones to get a tin cup and a peppermint stick (AND A PENNY) like in the books. Perhaps they would have been, but the show doesn’t give them a chance.

As the series went on, though, I liked it more and more. I’ll probably rewatch it. I’ll definitely watch season 2, and I’ll enjoy listening to the discussions on the Wilder podcast. It’s not quite as rich and warm as I had hoped, but I still really enjoyed spending more time with Laura and her family.