Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie is a lot of things, but the story of the Ingalls family is not really one of them. The book that season one is based on — the third in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved nine-part series — chronicles the family’s westward journey to Kansas and their efforts to build a homestead in Indian Territory, 40 miles from the nearest town. Most of the book takes place at their home, for which the book is named, and its endearing stories of life on the prairie have inspired generations of little readers to mimic the grit, independence, and discipline that helped families like the Ingalls build the West.
In the new Netflix series, released last week, the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda. (Spoilers ahead.) With many glaring factual departures from the book, it’s as if Hallmark made a movie with recycled Little House costumes and set.
No longer is the story about the Ingalls building a life alone on the frontier; in fact, Pa is scolded in the first episode for dragging his family to Kansas, because it’s “a myth that men can make it out here alone.” Changes to the plot have been made to emphasize this; in the books, the Ingalls fight off a prairie fire alone, but now the town fights it off together. As Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village.
And the village is exactly what Sonnenshine offers, with an array of DEI box-checking new characters who don’t appear in the book. They include a mean, racist lady and her fat, conniving husband, who represent “traditional, white America, looking to reproduce its institutions and values and racism and xenophobia in the West,” according to Time Magazine. There’s a friendly black storekeeper lady who is discriminated against by aforementioned evil white woman, and a girlbossing Frenchwoman who wears pants(!). And prominently featured is an Osage Indian family with a little girl Laura’s age, who are presented as a clear foil to the Ingalls family. (George Tann, the kind black doctor who appears briefly in the books, has also been reimagined as a central character.)
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