‘Little House on the Prairie’ Fails the Test of Time

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.

The original Little House series quickly moved past the events of the eponymous book, in which the family briefly settles in Kansas, on tribal land known as the Osage Diminished Reserve, situating the Ingallses more permanently in Minnesota. Netflix’s take differentiates itself by devoting its entire first season to the earlier period. Charming patriarch Charles, a.k.a. Pa (Luke Bracey), rolls out of Wisconsin to seek his fortune on the frontier, with a wife, Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), who turns out to be pregnant, and two daughters in tow. The eldest, Mary (Skywalker Hughes), loves school and boys; on the other side of puberty is her kid sister, Laura, a spitfire tomboy brought to vivacious life by Alice Halsey. An early encounter with wolves sets the tone for a succession of hardships: malaria, money troubles, a home invasion.