{"id":913,"date":"2026-07-15T12:37:21","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T12:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=913"},"modified":"2026-07-15T12:37:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T12:37:21","slug":"netflixs-little-house-on-the-prairie-is-a-betrayal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=913","title":{"rendered":"Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie Is A Betrayal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Netflix\u2019s new Little House on the Prairie<\/em> 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 \u2014 the third in Laura Ingalls Wilder\u2019s beloved nine-part series \u2014 chronicles the family\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Dems\u2019 Star Witness For AG Hearing Pushed Clemency For \u2018Rapists, Child Molesters, And Murderers\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/em>) With many glaring factual departures from the book, it\u2019s as if Hallmark made a movie with recycled Little House<\/em> costumes and set. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201ca myth that men can make it out here alone.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

And the village is exactly what Sonnenshine offers, with an array of DEI box-checking new characters who don\u2019t appear in the book. They include a mean, racist lady and her fat, conniving husband, who represent \u201ctraditional, white America, looking to reproduce its institutions and values and racism and xenophobia in the West,\u201d according to Time Magazine. There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

The moral of the story is that self-reliance is overrated and even foolish, and the frontier was actually built on kumbaya and self-discovery. (Sonnenshine said as much in an interview with Publishers Weekly.) Laura makes the point explicit in a speech to the town of Independence, Kansas, in the season finale.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndependence isn\u2019t about self-reliance or liberty or freedom or any of those things,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt\u2019s a place to come together, a place to find out who you really are.\u201d<\/p>\n

You see, the settlers didn\u2019t go West to build a nation for their posterity. \u201cWe came here to be the best versions of ourselves,\u201d Ma reminds Pa, sounding like a 21st-century woman with her therapist on speed dial. (Elsewhere, Ma says her vision for the town is \u201ca place where everyone can become who they\u2019re meant to be,\u201d and \u201cWhat if this is where we finally become who we were meant to be?\u201d Just in case you didn\u2019t pick up on the theme the first few times, the storekeeper puts it this way: \u201cDon\u2019t you deserve a home where you feel like you belong? Isn\u2019t that what coming out here was about for all of us?\u201d)<\/p>\n

Even Pa is no longer inspired by a desire for freedom and Manifest Destiny, which is colonial and icky. No, Sonnenshine tells us, he dragged his family from the comforts of the Big Woods because of a fight with his relatives, which we later learn happened because he tried to put his Civil War veteran brother in therapy. (It\u2019s a bizarrely emphasized plot line, and completely unfaithful to the books.) The relatives all hate Pa, who is loveably naive and keeps screwing up. <\/p>\n

\u201cOur version of the story definitely demystifies the idea of the self-made man,\u201d the actor who plays Pa told The New York Times. In Sonnenshine\u2019s words, the show aspires to \u201cnot fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity.\u201d If you\u2019ve read the books, you know what a dishonest betrayal that is of Charles Ingalls. A great part of the original story\u2019s charm is derived from Laura\u2019s unquestioning adoration and respect for her father, as he capably protects his family in the wilderness.<\/p>\n

Read more Docs: Democrat Special Counsel Jack Smith Spied On, Lied To Congress<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, instead of riding with wolves and hunting down panthers, Pa is forced to go through the humiliation ritual of uttering stunted dialogue like \u201cI could say I\u2019m your father and I know best, but I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true anymore.\u201d Such exchanges have replaced scenes from the book in which the girls are fairly but sternly disciplined by their parents \u2014 now, Mary scolds Pa and Ma when they argue.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll be shocked to learn that all eight episodes were directed by and six of them were written by women, a fact that is celebrated by The New York Times. Ma \u201chas the more substantial character arc, starting out as a submissive wife and gradually coming into her own.\u201d Part of this trajectory involves Ma contemplating an offer from her sister to leave Pa in Kansas and go back to the Big Woods with her daughters, which she threatens to accept while in a fight with Pa. This explores how women \u201cwere the backbone of \u2026 the formation of the country,\u201d Sonnenshine says. The show \u201ctried to deal\u201d with the \u201cissue\u201d of prairie bonnets being tradwife-coded by using a broader variety of headwear, the Times notes.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the most glaring betrayal of all, which involves the Netflix show using Wilder\u2019s story to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians\u2019 land. When Indians raid the Ingalls\u2019 home in Pa\u2019s absence, Pa runs to the Osage family to complain that he \u201ccan\u2019t have strangers walking into my house uninvited.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they\u2019d say the same thing,\u201d the man explains, telling Pa that the young men of the tribe see raiding the settlers\u2019 homes as a sort of \u201crent\u201d for living on their land. Pa then asks if he can pay these reparations in advance. <\/p>\n

The Osage negotiating a deal with the federal government for their land is the central focus of an entire 52-minute episode, in which Pa does a land acknowledgement and apologizes to his Osage friend for not seeing \u201cthe truth\u201d because he \u201ccould only think of my own family.\u201d Ma, who did not like Indians in the books, puts the racist settlers of the town in their place. (\u201cI\u2019m going to talk some men out of doing something stupid,\u201d she says.) Earlier in the season, the beloved Mr. Edwards \u2014 who has been reimagined as a more complicated, alcoholic, trauma-burdened version of himself \u2014 suggests that \u201cmaybe\u201d the land \u201cdoesn\u2019t need to belong to any of us.\u201d It\u2019s a dramatic departure from the book, which depicts the Osage heroically preventing the other Indian tribes from attacking the settler families.<\/p>\n

For this revisionist history, Sonnenshine received praise from Time for her \u201cvision of frontier multiculturalism battling entrenched white supremacy,\u201d which is a more brutal condemnation than anything I could come up with. Even this vision for the Ingalls is not sufficiently self-flagellating for Time, which chastises the show for not tarnishing the family\u2019s reputation enough.<\/p>\n

Sonnenshine has succeeded at hollowing out all the heart from Wilder\u2019s stories, shaking them down for sentimentality without ever actually being profound. It\u2019s not moving, as the books or the original 1970s television series are. It\u2019s just there, like Pa talking to the Indians, awkwardly apologizing for its own existence.<\/p>\n

Read more Democrat Responds To Threats Against SCOTUS Families By Accusing Justices Of Taking Bribes<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Netflix’s new ‘Little House on the Prairie’ gracelessly trashes the story of self-reliance that made its source material beloved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2450],"tags":[2596,105,2898,2873,2874,2899,2876,1418,2900],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-television","tag-frontier","tag-history","tag-laura-ingalls","tag-laura-ingalls-wilder","tag-little-house-on-the-prairie","tag-netflix","tag-rebecca-sonnenshine","tag-television","tag-tv"],"yoast_head":"\nNetflix’s Little House On The Prairie Is A Betrayal - Property Transition Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/propertytransitionmedia.com\/?p=913\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie Is A Betrayal - 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