Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie, has compared the show’s set to Mad Men, describing cast members “standing around with cigarettes and glasses of gin” between takes. She made the remarks while marking the series’ 50th anniversary with fellow cast members at Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley, adding that creator Michael Landon took part in the same habits. Her account paints a strikingly different backstage picture of the wholesome NBC family drama that ran from 1974 to 1983.
On screen, Walnut Grove ran on prayer and homespun virtue. Off camera, according to Alison Arngrim, it looked more like a Madison Avenue lunch break. The actress who spent nine seasons tormenting the Ingalls family as Nellie Oleson says the adults around her treated the set less like a prairie schoolhouse and more like a bar with cameras. Cigarettes lit between takes, gin poured before the next scene, all while the show quietly built the wholesome legacy that still fills reruns fifty years later.
The mean girl of Walnut Grove spills the beans
Few series wear their virtue as openly as Little House on the Prairie, the frontier drama that ran on NBC for 9 seasons, from 1974 to 1983, adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical books. Yet according to Alison Arngrim, who played the delightfully awful Nellie Oleson, the atmosphere behind the cameras owed less to prairie piety than to the freewheeling habits of 1970s Hollywood.
Gin between takes while Walnut Grove prayed on screen
Speaking around the show’s 50th anniversary, Arngrim offered a memorable snapshot of daily life on the production. “It was kind of strange you’re… on set and people are standing around with cigarettes and glasses of gin,” she recalled. Her comparison of choice was Mad Men: “They were older, which also meant…it was kind of like Mad Men, the three martini lunch,” she said.
She was quick to place it all in context rather than scandal. “It seemed odd, but that was TV in the ’70s,” she noted, describing colleagues who “came from an era where everybody smoked, and everybody drank, like all the time.” The tone is affectionate, closer to a wink than an exposé.
Michael Landon, man of his era
The show’s creator and star was no exception. Arngrim said Michael Landon, who wrote, directed and anchored the series as Charles Ingalls, “did all of these things.” Coming from a former child actor, the detail lands with a certain irony: while the Ingalls family modeled homespun decency on screen, the adults running the operation lived by the looser workplace codes of their decade.
Half a century later, the prairie still draws a crowd
None of this has dimmed the show’s standing, least of all for Arngrim herself. “We had no concept that this show would still be airing on television 50 years later,” she said, marveling at a series that still reruns across American television. Her comments came as the surviving cast gathered at Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley, California, the ranch where much of the series was filmed.
That gathering, the official 50th-anniversary Cast Reunion & Festival, brought fans and former co-stars together for 3 days, from March 22 to 24, 2024, exactly half a century after the show’s 1974 debut.