1 hour ago
4
Rebecca Sonnenshine’s adaptation of “Little House on the Prairie” wears its big heart on its rolled-up sleeve. Little Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) hears and gives impassioned speeches about hope as a necessary component for a happy life. Wise Doctor Tann (Jocko Sims) espouses the virtues of community and compassion in the frontier, where families can fall apart from heat waves, cold fronts, wild beasts, and ordinary ailments. This is an earnest, uplifting story about earnest, uplifting people — as you may expect, if you’re at all familiar with the “Little House” franchise.
But perhaps the defining ethos of a series designed to emulate the beauty evoked in past iterations — specifically, of building a family from the ground up — while rebuking the TV series’ fixation on homesteaders’ perpetual misery and the books’ embrace of conservative individualism, comes in a brief exchange during the second episode.
Early in the process of constructing his log cabin, Charlie “Pa” Ingalls (Luke Bracey) is worried. His neighbor and helping hand, John Edwards (Warren Christie), just informed him the land he’s claimed isn’t officially open for settlement. The Osage Nation lives there, too. The government is still negotiating treaties. The railroad is still determining where to lay tracks, and there’s always thieves, developers, and even wildfires to worry about. What if all his hard labor is for nought? What if it’s all gone tomorrow? What if someone comes along and takes it from him?
“Maybe it doesn’t need to belong to any of us,” John says. “Maybe we just live our lives in peace.”
“Where’s the security in that?,” Charlie says.
“Who said there is such a thing?,” John says.
There are no guarantees in life, but that hasn’t stopped mankind from consistently searching for some semblance of security. For the Ingalls, it’s simple: a house, a farm, a small piece of a great prairie that can provide for their growing family. Is that too much to ask?
In 2026, when home ownership is a pipe dream for anyone born after 1995, audiences might shout, “Yes!” But if they’re asked instead, “Should it be?,” the answer would be equally assertive: Of course not. The ceiling on the American dream has been lowered so drastically in the 150 years since Charlie and John’s (made-up) conversation, most viewers would settle for a version of security where their rental unit won’t be bought out by private equity for — let’s dream big here — five years.
But thinking practically doesn’t mean forgetting what’s possible, and the allure of Netflix‘s “Little House on the Prairie” lies not only in its romantic vision of wide open spaces (made all the more staggering by pilot D.P. Ari Wegner, who shot “The Power of the Dog,” and an all-female directing team including Sarah Adina Smith, Erica Tremblay, and Sydney Freeland), where men forge friendships by building each other’s homes, women are paid to teach the next generation, and kids can be relied on to provide the night’s dinner just as often as they’re trusted to run freely through fields of wheat; it also rests in its back-to-basics ideology: Sharing is caring.
Sonnenshine, who developed the reboot, doesn’t lay her lesson on too thick, wisely rooting it in a story as much about a family finding their home as they are finding themselves. The series starts just like the original NBC edition — well, almost: The Ingalls leave their extended family in Wisconsin and set out on their own for Kansas, where Charlie is told there’s “free land.” While there are a few backstories teased out over the first season, the main reason for their departure is straightforward: “It was getting too crowded,” Charlie says.
But that’s where his isolationist streak ends. Upon arriving in Independence and settling a few miles outside the still-forming town, Charlie proves himself a welcoming patriarch: He makes friends with the standoffish John Edwards (who pulls a gun on him the first time they speak). He helps out in town (drawing flyers, building churches), and he encourages his wife Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and eldest daughter Mary (Skywalker Hughes) to play nice with their neighbors, an Osage family.
Alice Halsey and Luke Bracey in ‘Little House on the Prairie’Courtesy of Eric Zachanowich / Netflix“Little House on the Prairie” stops short of giving the Mitchells equal weight to the Ingalls, but it nimbly expands into varied perspectives as the core family forms their new community. While Charlie is trying to establish a home, William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) is trying to keep his. He knows settlers are coming, but he and his wife, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), have to balance preserving their culture with adapting to changing times. Do they resist the colonizers or work alongside them?
Similar questions hang over market owner Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), a Black woman who’s not always made to feel welcome among white society (despite literally providing the food and goods for their survival), and Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag), a French immigrant and proudly single woman who forges her own path, around or through. They’re all trying to make their way as businessmen and government officials make new rules, but “Little House on the Prairie” frames their lives beyond their problems. It’s not about surviving, but living.
Never is that clearer than with Laura. Her eyes wide and gaze inquisitive, Laura takes in everything around her. She sees her mother’s worried expression as the Osage warriors return from their hunt. She sees her sister’s hurt feelings when prissy girls tease her for liking the wrong boy. She sees her father’s reassuring smile when facing long odds, and she sees the eager, easy benevolence in a friend’s offer to help.
That last sight she sees more than once, and so do we. “Little House on the Prairie” can feel too neat-and-tidy in its pretty presentation of pioneer life, which, in turn, can make certain plainspoken scenes come across as spurious when there’s no friction to their emotional register. But its insistence on seeing the birth of a nation as a dangerous endeavor requiring persistent, even arduous, generosity proves enchanting. The hard work isn’t just in building the house, but in knowing when to tear down its walls so you can welcome more people inside.
Grade: B+
“Little House on the Prairie” premieres Thursday, July 9 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released at once. The series has already been renewed for Season 2.
English (US) ·