Little House on the Stolen Prairie A new adaptation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series punctures the fantasy.

By Kathryn VanArendonk

Photo-Illustration: Susanna Hayward; Photos: Netflix, NBC/Getty Images

Developed by writer Rebecca Sonnenshine and producer Joy Gorman Wettels, this Little House on the Prairie comes at a weighty moment, days after America’s 250th birthday. The original Little House books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, were published almost 100 years ago; they are constructed from Wilder’s memories of her childhood as her father, Charles Ingalls, made repeated, frequently failed efforts to build a future for his family on the Great Plains in the 1860s and ’70s. After setting out to build a homestead at the promise of cheap and abundant land, they retreated to Wisconsin as the federal status of the territory they had been trying to claim remained unclear. Depending on your point of view, Wilder’s story is either a grand, hopeful saga of how this country was built or a fraught piece of American propaganda, full of convenient gaps and racist descriptions of the Native Americans whose land the Ingallses are claiming for themselves. The adaptation holds both perspectives, reaching for sweeping romanticism in one moment and somber reconsideration in the next, as much wholesome Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as it is grief-filled Killers of the Flower Moon. In places, it’s a deliberately unfaithful adaptation. Its greatest strength is that it often feels like a show at war with itself.

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