{"id":753356,"date":"2026-07-09T21:50:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/753356\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T21:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:50:09","slug":"little-house-on-the-prairie-netflix-woke-ified-laura-ingalls-wilders-story-for-better-and-for-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/753356\/","title":{"rendered":"Little House on the Prairie: Netflix woke-ified Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s story, for better and for worse."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Megyn Kelly, start your engines: \u201cIf you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project,\u201d the conservative podcaster tagged Netflix last year<\/a>, when the streamer\u2019s remake of the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder story was announced. Now, as of Thursday, we have that reboot\u2014eight episodes, with another season already on the way\u2014sanitized in a way that\u2019s sure to annoy Little House purists of all kinds, including the likes of Kelly.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no other way for me to put this: Netflix did indeed woke-ify Little House on the Prairie. This new version makes a deep bow to contemporary concerns about the politics of the source material. Some of the Ingalls family\u2019s closest new friends on the show are an Osage couple, a Black doctor and Black storekeeper, and a French Canadian woman who wears trousers and practices free love. Laura (Alice Halsey) has a best friend who\u2019s Osage, and her sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) isn\u2019t blond. (I can already hear the yowls from the types of X users who unironically retweet A.I.-generated images of Sydney Sweeney<\/a> adorned in red, white, and blue.) Even Jack has been gentrified into some kind of cute border collie, not a bulldog, far from the fierce canine described in the book. The show makes all these changes while still delivering a super-American, down-the-middle, borderline-Hallmark message: People of all races can be friends, family is everything, singing and dancing to your dad\u2019s fiddle makes for a great night\u2019s entertainment, and little babies? They\u2019re adorable.<\/p>\n

The Netflix series covers the events of the Little House on the Prairie novel published in 1935, which tells the story of the family\u2019s year living near Independence, Kansas. This phase of the Ingalls family\u2019s saga is great for television, because it\u2019s full of incident: Ma gets her foot smashed while helping Pa build the cabin. The whole family suffers from malaria. A neighbor who\u2019s helping dig a well passes out after failing to check for poisonous gases. Prairie fires threaten the Ingalls homestead. The Osage pass by the cabin in big groups, and one time, a few of them come in without invitation, while Pa\u2019s away. Although Laura Ingalls was smaller during this year than she\u2019s represented as on the show (4 to 5 years old, as opposed to Netflix\u2019s tweenager), that time made a lasting impression. As Caroline Fraser summed it up in her Pulitzer-winning 2017 biography of the writer<\/a>, the year in Kansas \u201cshaped Laura\u2019s temperament and outlook for the rest of her life. That year made her who she was.\u201d Her fascination with the prairie and its Osage inhabitants; her nearly blind love for her father; Laura\u2019s growing feeling that she was the \u201cwild\u201d one and her sister Mary was the \u201cgood\u201d one\u2014you can see it all in this novel, which is why many of its events are likely what come right to mind when you think \u201cLittle House,\u201d even with the series\u2019 total of nine books spanning Laura\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

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Netflix\u2019s take, with its young and beautiful Ingalls parents, sassy and resourceful Ingalls sisters, and full cast of multicultural Ingalls friends, is undeniably a crowd-pleaser. It will appeal to many with its handsome cast and fun scenes of square dancing, but it also saps the story of the odd qualities that make it so memorable. Wilder was grown when she wrote the novels, but they feel made up of scattered indelible core memories, retained by a child who barely understands her parents, but still worships them\u2014even when they make very big mistakes, as her father, Charles Ingalls, did during this year in Kansas. One-star Goodreads reviews of Fraser\u2019s excellent biography<\/a> are often written by people who love Pa, and can\u2019t stand how she depicts him: a charming but feckless man who drags his family from pillar to post, defaulting on mortgages, trying again and again to farm and never succeeding. The Ingallses, Fraser shows with ample reference to the historical record, were not just roughing it, as all pioneers might\u2014they were poor. \u201cThey would never recover the economic ground lost in Kansas\u201d when Charles ill-advisedly claimed a patch of prairie, built a house, and cultivated land that he wasn\u2019t able to keep in the wake of the government\u2019s recategorization of its status, Fraser writes. \u201cLaura would never refer to him in print as a \u2018squatter,\u2019 \u201d Fraser wrote. \u201cBut she knew he was.\u201d This information throws the story of Little House on the Prairie into new light, and although some who love the Ingallses obviously find it upsetting, I think it makes the novels more interesting\u2014the Ingallses, Laura\u2019s beliefs about them aside, weren\u2019t just \u201ctypical Americans,\u201d they were a very particular family.<\/p>\n

The Netflix adaptation does show some of this familial stress, as Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and Charles (Luke Bracey) worry over money, but the two of them, in a very modern egalitarian fashion, always hug and resolve to \u201cfigure it out together.\u201d And then there\u2019s the fact that, in the show\u2019s telling, the family leaves Wisconsin and their relatives because of a tragedy and a falling-out\u2014an embellishment that lifts much of the blame for the failed move from Charles\u2019 shoulders. As in the Michael Landon Little House series from the 1970s and 1980s (which has been a huge streaming hit for Peacock in recent years<\/a>), Charles is hot and charismatic, a daughter\u2019s memory of a beloved father instead of a real person. But Netflix\u2019s Charles is not just funny\u2014fiddling, joking, and ruffling his hair up to pretend to be a mad dog\u2014he\u2019s also an ally. He celebrates having only daughters, and befriends all those around Independence who need defending. He takes such a thoughtful interest in the fate of the Osage that he attends the council where they decide whether they will give up the land and their way of life or stand up against the government, and worries whether the settlement they ultimately accept is fair.<\/p>\n

The biggest departure from the source material is the role of the Osage, who, in the book, are an object of Laura\u2019s fascination, a symbol of the wild nature of the land they must (through, Laura perceives, no fault of the settlers) inevitably leave. A very memorable episode in the novel has Laura watching a line of Osage traversing a trail by the cabin and coveting their babies, begging her father to \u201cget\u201d her one. (Charles becomes angry and reminds her they have their own baby, Carrie.) In Netflix\u2019s show, instead, Laura befriends Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), a similarly aged daughter of an Osage couple, Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) and White Sun (Alyssa Wapanat\u00e2hk), who were educated in a white-run school for Native children in Minnesota and live away from their tribe in a nearby cabin. Good Eagle\u2019s family has a better library than the Ingallses\u2019, a shelf Caroline comes to covet. It\u2019s this family\u2019s presence in the Ingallses\u2019 lives that will probably draw the most accusations of \u201cwokeness\u201d from those inclined to look for it, but the family friendship that develops with Good Eagle and her parents, who straddle the cultural line between settler and Osage, is also a very neat way to resolve any queasiness around the Ingallses\u2019 settler status. Even Caroline (who, in the books, would never) befriends Good Eagle\u2019s mother and teaches Good Eagle lessons in the Ingalls cabin, alongside Mary and Laura.<\/p>\n

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Yes, Netflix\u2019s Ingalls family are good people, even by 2026 standards, and you can see it in contrast with the Jameses. The Jameses are town-dwelling rich folk who don\u2019t appear in the Little House books but seem to be an adaptation of the Oleson family. (The Olesons, with that evil little Nellie, first show up in 1937\u2019s On the Banks of Plum Creek.) The Jameses\u2019 vision for Independence\u2014hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school\u2014first seduces, then repels, the more gentle-minded Ingallses, Ma and Mary. The James matriarch, Jemma, played by Mary Holland, brings a welcome comedic hateability to this sunny show, which is otherwise chock-full of far too many sentimental moments. Twice in two episodes, a couple gets close to kissing, then springs apart when someone enters the room unexpectedly. It\u2019s that kind of television\u2014the Christmas episode is especially schmaltzy. This show also gets an \u201cF\u201d on the \u201cmuddy streets of Deadwood<\/a>\u201d test I mentally apply to any historical media\u2014Independence\u2019s byways and alleys, like the avenues of New York in The Gilded Age<\/a>, are perfectly clean, strewn with straw, zero manure. And, although a character refers to the fact that the Ingallses\u2019 friend Mr.\u00a0Edwards (Warren Christie) gets drunk and passes out in public, you won\u2019t see this kind of adult disorder on the streets of Independence. And by the end of these eight episodes, Mr.\u00a0Edwards has dried out, anyway.<\/p>\n

In fact, things were going so well for everyone around Episode 7\u2014the Jameses brought down a peg by Caroline\u2019s organizing talents and Mary\u2019s skill with a sampler; Mary falling in love with the show invention Caleb (Kowen Cadorath), a boy who works at the general store; Dr.\u00a0Tann (Jocko Sims) and the storekeeper Emily (Barrett Doss) paired up; the prairie fire that approaches the town averted by the hand of God\u2014I wondered whether Netflix would let the Ingallses stay in Independence for a second season with these friends. That would have been the ultimate betrayal of the books, which are inherently episodic, based as they are on the story of a family that moved around every couple of years. But no\u2014after tragedy, the Ingallses must leave, perched in their wagon, singing their songs. It\u2019s a surprisingly upsetting end, for a show that tries so hard to satisfy.<\/p>\n

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