TV Pick of the Week: Little House on the Prairie - review by Yvette Huddleston
Little House on the Prairie Netflix, review by Yvette Huddleston
For those of us growing up in the 1970s and 80s, The Little House on the Prairie was a much-loved series, one of those that was an absolute must-watch. It was certainly a significant part of my childhood.
Adapted from the children’s novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder and based on the author’s experiences growing up in a settler and pioneer family in the late 19th century American Midwest, the stories were about resilience, love and family. This reboot from Netflix is as engaging as the original, all set against a picturesque backdrop of big skies and wide prairies and features lovely performances from a strong cast.
We meet the Ingalls family – Pa (Luke Bracey), Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald), daughter Mary (Skywalker Hughes) and her younger sister Laura (Alice Halsey – as they leave their home in Wisconsin and head west to the make a new life for themselves in Kansas. Ma is not pleased about uprooting and neither is Mary – “you didn’t mind leaving because you didn’t have any friends, I did,” she says nastily to her sibling at one point – but Pa and Laura are looking forward to the adventure.
In a tense early sequence as they try to cross a river with their covered wagon, they almost lose all their belongings, Ma is injured and their dog Jack jumps in the water and is swept away. When they arrive in the town of Independence, it is not as developed as they had imagined – there is no school (Laura is delighted), no church and no post office and the prices in the general store are higher than expected, due to the transport costs involved. People are not initially as friendly as they had hoped apart from troubled near neighbour John Edwards (Warren Christie) who lives alone in a tiny wooden shack, grieving the loss of his wife and daughters and numbing the pain with whisky, but he offers to help Pa build their house.
While there are difficulties and challenges, some dark undercurrents and an acknowledgement that the land the Ingalls are living on actually belongs to the Osage Native American tribe, this is a very much still an airbrushed version of the past and as such means that it works in the same way as the original. And this time round, it delivers a double dose of nostalgia – for the late 20th century, as well as for the (heavily sanitised version of) the late 19th century.