Netflix<\/a>, from Thursday). However, the inspiration for this resurrected Prairie is not the Landon series, which ran from 1974 to 1983, but the original Laura Ingalls Wilder books that recount her late-19th-century childhood in the unconquered American Midwest.<\/p>\nThe story is more or less unchanged. We meet Laura (Alice Halsey) and her family as they up sticks and head out into uncharted Kansas, seeking land and freedom. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s all the idea of Laura\u2019s father, Charles (Luke Bracey, who replaces Landon and has twice the stubble and half the charm) \u2013 and proceeds over the quiet objections of Laura\u2019s mother, Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald).<\/p>\n
Mother\u2019s misgivings at first seem entirely justified. There is nothing out in the West but wilderness and wolves. When an initial attempt at building a log-cabin goes amiss, Laura and her sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) find themselves roughing it in a tent. It\u2019s Electric Picnic minus the giant techno Ferris wheel.<\/p>\n
Quite a few things have changed since Ingalls published her memoirs \u2013 and even since the 1980s when Landon bestrode our TV screens. For one thing, the idea of a group of heavily armed white people wading into the uncharted American West and claiming a chunk of land as their own is now seen through a very different lens.<\/p>\n
That adjustment to our thinking is acknowledged in this new adaptation when Laura\u2019s father bumps into a local Native American (Meegwun Fairbrother) and cheerfully announces that they are now neighbours. The other man throws him a glance that makes it all too clear that the newcomers are not neighbours but invaders.<\/p>\n
The series is true to the original books in that it features African-American Doctor Tann (Jocko Sims) \u2013 a character written out of the Landon show. Setting aside that, the show, in fact, has remarkably little in common with its small screen predecessor: anyone expecting a straightforward nostalgia binge is going to be disappointed by this gritty take on Ingalls\u2019 memoirs.<\/p>\n
In place of the soapy, homespun qualities of the 1980s drama, this new take has the dreamy aspect of an art house movie. The sensory cinema of Terrence Malick is one obvious influence, as we see in lengthy sequences of Laura staring into the horizon or running through the grass.<\/p>\n
Netflix\u2019s Little House on the Prairie is beautiful to look at and well-acted \u2013 but so slow-moving as to appeal only to hard-core Laura Ingalls Wilder fans. The problem, as Netflix may soon discover, is that there isn\u2019t really such a thing in 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you are of a particular vintage, there is a decent chance Michael Landon\u2019s Little House on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540885,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,229856,1868],"class_list":["post-540884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-laura-ingalls-wilder","tag-netflix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}