Faulty reasoning signals

• Biased Writer Voice - 29%
• Negativity Bias - 23.5%
• Hasty Generalization - 16.5%

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Megyn Kelly, start your engines: “If you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project,” the conservative podcaster tagged Netflix last year , when the streamer’s remake of the beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder story was announced. Now, as of Thursday, we have that reboot—eight episodes, with another season already on the way—sanitized in a way that’s sure to annoy Little House purists of all kinds, including the likes of Kelly.

There’s 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’s 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’s Osage, and her sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) isn’t blond . (I can already hear the yowls from the types of X users who unironically retweet A.I.-generated images of Sydney Sweeney 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’s fiddle makes for a great night’s entertainment, and little babies? They’re adorable .

The Netflix series covers the events of the Little House on the Prairie novel published in 1935, which tells the story of the family’s year living near Independence, Kansas. This phase of the Ingalls family’s saga is great for television, because it’s full of incident: Ma gets her foot smashed while helping Pa build the cabin. The whole family suffers from malaria. A neighbor who’s 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’s away. Although Laura Ingalls was smaller during this year than she’s represented as on the show (4 to 5 years old, as opposed to Netflix’s tweenager), that time made a lasting impression. As Caroline Fraser summed it up in her Pulitzer-winning 2017 biography of the writer , the year in Kansas “shaped Laura’s temperament and outlook for the rest of her life. That year made her who she was.” Her fascination with the prairie and its Osage inhabitants; her nearly blind love for her father; Laura’s growing feeling that she was the “wild” one and her sister Mary was the “good” one—you can see it all in this novel, which is why many of its events are likely what come right to mind when you think “ Little House ,” even with the series’ total of nine books spanning Laura’s life.

Netflix’s 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—even when they make very big mistakes, as her father, Charles Ingalls, did during this year in Kansas. One-star Goodreads reviews of Fraser’s excellent biography are often written by people who love Pa, and can’t 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—they were poor. “They would never recover the economic ground lost in Kansas” when Charles ill-advisedly claimed a patch of prairie, built a house, and cultivated land that he wasn’t able to keep in the wake of the government’s recategorization of its status, Fraser writes. “Laura would never refer to him in print as a ‘squatter,’ ” Fraser wrote. “But she knew he was.” 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—the Ingallses, Laura’s beliefs about them aside, weren’t just “typical Americans,” they were a very particular family.

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 “figure it out together.” And then there’s the fact that, in the show’s telling, the family leaves Wisconsin and their relatives because of a tragedy and a falling-out—an embellishment that lifts much of the blame for the failed move from Charles’ 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 ), Charles is hot and charismatic, a daughter’s memory of a beloved father instead of a real person. But Netflix’s Charles is not just funny—fiddling, joking, and ruffling his hair up to pretend to be a mad dog—he’s 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.

The biggest departure from the source material is the role of the Osage, who, in the book, are an object of Laura’s 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 “get” her one. (Charles becomes angry and reminds her they have their own baby, Carrie.) In Netflix’s show, instead, Laura befriends Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), a similarly aged daughter of an Osage couple, Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) and White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), 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’s family has a better library than the Ingallses’, a shelf Caroline comes to covet. It’s this family’s presence in the Ingallses’ lives that will probably draw the most accusations of “wokeness” 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’ settler status. Even Caroline (who, in the books, would never ) befriends Good Eagle’s mother and teaches Good Eagle lessons in the Ingalls cabin, alongside Mary and Laura.

Yes, Netflix’s 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’t 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’s On the Banks of Plum Creek .) The Jameses’ vision for Independence—hierarchy, respectability, a church, a school—first 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’s that kind of television—the Christmas episode is especially schmaltzy. This show also gets an “F” on the “ muddy streets of Deadwood ” test I mentally apply to any historical media—Independence’s byways and alleys, like the avenues of New York in The Gilded Age , are perfectly clean, strewn with straw, zero manure. And, although a character refers to the fact that the Ingallses’ friend Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie) gets drunk and passes out in public, you won’t see this kind of adult disorder on the streets of Independence. And by the end of these eight episodes, Mr. Edwards has dried out, anyway.

In fact, things were going so well for everyone around Episode 7—the Jameses brought down a peg by Caroline’s organizing talents and Mary’s skill with a sampler; Mary falling in love with the show invention Caleb (Kowen Cadorath), a boy who works at the general store; Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims) and the storekeeper Emily (Barrett Doss) paired up; the prairie fire that approaches the town averted by the hand of God—I 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—after tragedy, the Ingallses must leave, perched in their wagon, singing their songs. It’s a surprisingly upsetting end, for a show that tries so hard to satisfy.

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