The new old Little House

It's difficult to overstate just exactly how popular NBC's original Little House on the Prairie show was. Beginning in 1974, Little House ran for nine seasons at a level of TV glory that few series could even dream of. It won a list of awards as long as lodge pole, and made Michael Landon (and a handful of others) the kind of Hollywood stardom most Americans would recognize almost anywhere on the street.

 Just an hour or two north of us, Minnesota's Little House monuments features a river bank where, or so the docents claim, the Ingalls once inhabited a hole in the ground on their way west. It's not something you forget quickly, in part because seeing the Ingalls family--the TV version--crouched in a river bank hut doesn't fit exactly with the family that became the most celebrated TV family in history. 

That sweet and sentimental series captured more awards than many other really popular productions, and earned a viewership that was surprisingly universal--adults from 35-64 made up more than sixty percent of its viewing audience as late as 2024, when the original series was streamed on Peacock. The show's firm place in the American imagination was enough too make Netflix consider a reboot.

That reboot is running right now and doing very, very well. There are, of course, some major differences between the original series and the newly refashioned Little House.  One of the central conflicts of the family in the new series is their trespassing. By the time the original Ingalls family reached Kansas, they'd become squatters, living on property that, by law, belonged to the Osage tribe. It's hard to lift the kind of allegiance the whole family had in the original series when you know that they and hundreds of other white, American pioneers, were deliberately living on land that belonged to this country's original inhabitants. 

Then, too, historians claim that Pa Ingalls wasn't a whole lot like the Michael Landon version. They suggest that the records suggest that he wasn't the ace Pa who kept moving around the Great Plains, that he may not have been the nice guy the book and the series make him out to be. 

It's gutsy to make a reboot. Netflix had to know that. Any new version of the tales can't avoid the historic truth. Lets be clear here--the new Pa Ingalls is just as wonderful, just as loving, just as driven by justice (and just as handsome) as Michael Landon, but the central conflict of the new series is the fact that the Ingalls family lives on a swath of Osage tribal land, and the Osage aren't happy about it.

There are, as you can imagine, a bundle of other distinct changes, and a good deal less of the sentimentalizing so characteristic of the original series. The fact is, homesteading was probably never so sweet as it was in the old Little House. Some sweetsie stuff is unavoidable, but other major themes are more universalized--the conflicts between the Ingalls sisters, for instance, is newly adopted, and racism is more plainly evident.

No matter. I like it. It's almost impossible to think that this newly fashioned series could ever touch the massive popularity of the original, but that doesn't mean the newly minted version isn't worth your time or mine. 

Try it.