Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Little House on the Prairie About this episode You may be familiar with the world of Little House on the Prairie, either through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved books, or the 1970s TV adaptation. Now, Netflix is once again bringing the Ingalls family to life with a new series. It focuses on earlier in Laura's life in Kansas, where the promise of available land for the family comes at the expense of a local Osage population that's being pushed out. During this time, the Ingalls family must make friends in their local community and deal with the harsh realities of pioneer life.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:21 Linda Holmes? The Little House series of novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder have sold tens of millions of copies. They also were made into a very successful TV series beginning in the 1970s. Now, the Ingalls family is back in a new Little House on the Prairie series on Netflix that doesn't take place in Minnesota, where the old show spent most of its time. Instead, its focus is earlier in Laura's life, in Kansas, where the promise of available land for the family comes at the expense of a local Osage population that's being pushed out. I'm Linda Holmes, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is culture critic Kristin Meinzler. Hello, Kristin. Hey, Linda. Also with us is Soraya Nadia McDonald. She's a cultural critic and a journalist. Hello, Soraya.
1:05 Speaker 02 Hello, hello.
1:07 Linda Holmes? So, the Netflix take on Little House on the Prairie is based on the one Wilder book that was actually called Little House on the Prairie, which is about the family's time in Kansas. In the series, they move to a homestead near Independence because Charles, played here by Luke Bracy, is under the impression that the land is in the process of being made available for settlement. But in fact, it's on land where the Osage people very much still live, and the United States government is in the process of quote unquote negotiating to buy the land from them and persuade them to leave. The Ingalls family gets to know a local Osage family named the Mitchells, and Laura, played by Alice Halsey, becomes close friends with their daughter, Good Eagle. She's played by Ren Juwannam Gatz.
1:51 Speaker 03 I love poems, and I've always wanted to go to school in St. Paul where my mom and father went.
1:58 Speaker 04 You should come to school with us. Really? School would be so much better with you and not just Mary.
2:05 Linda Holmes? All eight episodes are streaming on Netflix now. Kristin, I'm gonna start with you. What did you think of this take on Little House on the Prairie?
2:14 Speaker 02 I loved this take. And full disclosure, I will say I am a Little House enthusiast. Not only have I read all the books and seen every episode of the show a million times, The 1970s Show, I've read every memoir of every star of the original 1970s series. And of course, read the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. So I am going in saying that. So I love this show because it includes a lot of the real history of Laura Ingalls Wilder's time in Kansas. There really was a Dr. Tan there who saves everybody from the fever. And I always missed him because there were black settlers, especially in Kansas. And this show depicts that. We have the Osage perspective actually shown.
2:58 Speaker 02 Not everything is through the eyes of Laura and her family. We actually go inside Osage households, Osage meetings and so on. So there's a little bit more nuance here than there was in the original series, which I appreciate. Is the show a little schlocky? Absolutely. Is it a little Hallmark? Yes, I would expect nothing less. But I still really love this show.
3:20 Linda Holmes? Yeah, and in fact, I will say, Warren Christie, who plays Mr. Edwards, is a Hallmark movie veteran. Very big deal in that universe. So if he looks familiar to you, then that's probably why.
3:32 Speaker 02 And he is so handsome.
3:34 Linda Holmes? He's very handsome. Soraya, what did you think?
3:36 Speaker 05 That does add an interesting wrinkle. I enjoyed this. I don't know that I was necessarily enthusiastic as Kristin. The high watermark for Netflix adaptations of children's literature remains Anne with an E, which is of course, the adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. That's still the one that I think remains like most beloved in my heart. And then probably after that is The Babysitter's Club. But I will say, I did enjoy this. It is a bit schlocky. And I think in some ways, I was maybe frustrated because I think it's a little easy. At the same time, I think Kristin is right, particularly regarding the
4:19 Speaker 05 presence of the Osage and the inclusion of sort of secondary characters, whether it be the woman who runs the general store or the doctor. And I'm glad that we have sort of a multiplicity of opinions and viewpoints and class as well, which also factors into how the Ingalls, you know, experienced this journey to Kansas and then their settlement there and the insecurity around it.
4:52 Linda Holmes? Yeah, I think that's right. I think I enjoyed this. I didn't care for it at first because I think, like Kristin, I was a devotee of particularly the old TV show when I was a kid. That was very heavily imprinted on me. It was in reruns for a super long time, even after, you know, it had originally run. So I think it took me a little while to get used to seeing other people in these roles, which is silly, but true. Once I got into it, I did enjoy a lot of things about it. I think there are some very nice family stories and I do appreciate, obviously, the fact that there is such an obviously sincere effort to include the point of view
5:33 Linda Holmes? of the Osage people who who already lived in the place where the Ingalls were moving to. And I think to get away from the idea that these were people who moved to places where nobody lived yet.
5:44 Speaker 05 Right.
5:44 Linda Holmes? And I think even on the old TV show, you would certainly see Indigenous people from time to time, but they were very much kind of outside the frame. It was a presence, but it was not integrated into the sort of the family life the way that it is here. With that said, They really do kind of, I think, force Charles to have a level of awareness about the situation that is probably a little much to put in the mouth of a guy at this time. I think he gives sort of ultimately a speech about, you know, they have the right to live here. Nobody has a right to make you leave your land. If you don't, that's
6:27 Linda Holmes? probably a little more enlightened than I would expect him to be. And it does feel a little sanitized in that regard because I think the problem here is like, is there any way in this material, which is fundamentally a very warm and happy story about a family that is, in this situation, squatters, right?
6:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:47 Linda Holmes? And ultimately, part of this westward expansion myth, is there any way to do that material and be fully sensitive? Probably not, right? The centering itself of that family is itself part of the issue of what has troubled the way we tell history.
7:07 Speaker 05 That's a choice.
7:07 Linda Holmes? At the same time, they involved a number of Osage people and other indigenous people in the making of the show. They do, as we've talked about, include the story of Dr. Tan, who was a real black doctor who existed in the Ingalls family's lives. I think they do a good job of making his story and his love story feel significant more than maybe I would have expected. It's like, I think this is probably the best job you can do with this material in making a children's show. And I think kids may really enjoy it. I know at least one other critic who's been watching it and whose kids have really liked it. It sort of is what it is to me.
7:49 Speaker 02 Yeah. And Lynda, I just want to agree with you. As much as I love this show, it's hard to make this all things to all people or do it in the best way, considering the source material. We are telling the story through the Ingalls family eyes most of the time. And the Ingalls family The show is trying to depict them as maybe better than they actually were, more open minded than they were, more heroic. I mean, come on, Charles is somehow the town's best architect and the town's best draftsman and the town's best like mayor in waiting and Carolyn is somehow the world's best community organizer and the most educated woman in town and a famous cook and baker. You know, there are definitely moments where it's like, maybe the Ingalls
8:30 Speaker 02 family is a little bit too perfect. But I will say in defense of the series, I do think it shows more of why Pa was a problem.
8:38 Linda Holmes? Yes, I think that's true.
8:39 Speaker 02 He was reckless. He was impetuous. It's not just that Carolyn is a stick in the mud. She has to put up with this reckless guy who doesn't ever do the responsible thing. Well, I'll be back in an hour, girls. And then it's like 18 hours later. Where's Pa been? And I love that the show actually depicts why that would be frustrating for his wife and children. That this is the kind of guy he is. And sure, he's lots of fun. He plays the fiddle really well. He is really unreliable and reckless.
9:08 Speaker 05 And it's a hard life.
9:11 Speaker 02 Yes.
9:11 Speaker 05 That's one of the things that always draws me to these is just thinking about how people got through in these 19th century lives where you were going somewhere where, you know, you may not necessarily see another human for days at a time, depending on where you end up settling, where you really are dependent on your wits, on being able to improvise and not panic. You have to have some sense. And thinking about the effects that that has on two children, right? One of whom is maybe a tween and the other one who is is kind of heading into puberty with Laura and Mary, who are still clinging, well,
9:55 Speaker 05 at least their mother is kind of clinging to these ideals of she still wants them to be at least kind of ladylike. You know, and all these things that are sort of fighting with each other as you are are literally raising a house from scratch, right? Where you are starting with a campsite and sort of a makeshift kitchen and a fire, some horses, and then you are having to clear the land. You are the one who is building this cabin. All of these things that just take a tremendous amount of time and effort and energy. One of the things actually that I kept thinking about as I was watching wasn't just the books,
10:40 Speaker 05 which is I had more familiarity with the books than I did with the TV show. But the other thing, because I grew up watching so much public television, was that I was thinking about Frontier House.
10:53 Linda Holmes? Ah, love that show.
10:55 Speaker 05 And then was also thinking about the HBO Max series, the reality series Back to the Frontier, right? When you take these three modern day American families and say, here, try this out. And just how, how difficult it is, how, how much your days are filled from sunup to sundown with everything that you've got to do to survive.
11:22 Linda Holmes? Well, right. And they're in a place where there's not a church until you make a church. There's not a school until you make a school. It's not just that you're moving to, that's because they're trying to create a particular type of town, right? As we've already said, it's not that you're moving to a blank slate. If you have an idea of the kind of town that you want to build there, you have to build all the pieces of it, right?
11:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:42 Linda Holmes? Uh, one thing I'm curious about in this conversation, we talked about the fact that you see more of the Osage community, more of this family, the Mitchells. How did you think that worked in the show overall?
11:54 Speaker 05 I liked that there was a diversity of opinions about the settlers, right? You have someone who kind of sees the arrival of more settlers as inevitable and is trying to come to some way of resolving, you know, this, what he sees as this inevitability, that's not everyone, right? You've got Good Eagle's mother and her uncle, right? Who have a different perspective. Honestly, like, I was kind of surprised that those two guys were not like immediately shocked.
12:24 Speaker 02 The two guys who break into the Ingalls' house?
12:27 Linda Holmes? I liked also the fact that when you do get that perspective on the Mitchells in particular, but the Mitchells and all the people that they know, White Son and William and Good Eagle, I think they make the point that the Osage live in different, they have a lot of different levels of proximity to kind of the way that the Ingalls are living. Some of them live more similarly to how Charles and Caroline are raising their kids, some of them less so, right? It's not a thing where like everybody has, in addition to the diversity of opinions that they have about the settlers, you know, there are a lot of different ways to live as an Osage person in this time. And I think they do a good job of bringing out some of that.
13:11 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I also think they do a really good job of not showing the Osage characters as just victims.
13:17 Speaker 05 No.
13:18 Speaker 02 Just noble heroes.
13:19 Linda Holmes? Oh, for sure.
13:20 Speaker 02 Or just savages.
13:21 Speaker 05 Exactly.
13:21 Speaker 02 I hate to use the word savages, but I think that's how a lot of media have depicted native peoples in Western settlement stories.
13:29 Speaker 05 Or unlearned, right?
13:30 Linda Holmes? Yes.
13:31 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly. But it's like, no, what we're seeing, folks who are educated, we're seeing folks who have marital strife. We're seeing folks who push back in big and small ways against the settlers, in small ways where it's like, I'm gonna steal your coffee, and in bigger ways where they're meeting with other leaders and saying, what can we do as far as policy is concerned? And I like that we see that diversity of approaches and the diversity of characters because normally we don't see that in Western settlement stories. It usually is just like- They're all like this, those people. And instead, we're coming inside the homes and the conversations with the native characters on this show. Of course, the Ingalls family is still the primary focus of the show, though.
14:16 Speaker 02 I mean, I don't want to whitewash it and make it sound like this is all about the Osage characters. It's not, but it does give enough respect, I think, to the Osage characters where, I don't know about YouTube, but episode seven, I sobbed through the whole episode. I cried and cried through that episode.
14:31 Speaker 05 I think also with White Son, having this, you know, these experiences of, of becoming literate in English, like at an Indian boarding school, which we know were horrific, right? And were intent on sort of kill the Indian, save the man, or save the child. She is informed by that experience, not just with her familiarity with literature, but also, you know, when there is a possible opportunity for a good eagle to join, you know, Mary and Laura's homeschooling. This isn't something that she immediately sort of jumps toward and says yes, you know,
15:13 Speaker 05 but really articulates, we don't know what they're going to fill, you know, our child's head with.
15:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:18 Speaker 05 You know, which speaks to, I think, like very real and longstanding and justified skepticism, even to what, you know, we would conceive of as, if not charity, generosity.
15:33 Speaker 02 That is a great point. We've got a lot more after the break.
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16:48 Linda Holmes? Welcome back. I think if I had a quibble with this show in the beginning, and I think this comes from the fact, you know, Soraya mentioned being more attached to the books than the show. As I said, I was more attached to the show than the books. And I think for me, watching that show when I was young, I felt such a kinship with Laura as a younger sister who was always a little bit in trouble and a little bit talked too much and a little bit, kind of, people found her irritating. And I related to that, honestly. And I do think it takes a little time in the show for them to differentiate the girls enough.
17:28 Linda Holmes? I think at the beginning, they're kind of both, they're sort of both very similar at the beginning. And it takes a while for the side of Laura that is a little more adventurous than Mary, a little more, you know, rambunctious than Mary, but I still think not that much, probably not as much as I would have preferred. They're a little bit, just both really nice, good girls all the time.
17:50 Speaker 05 Certainly, she's more curious, I think.
17:52 Linda Holmes? Yeah, but I think I missed the sort of, I really was so attached to that take from from television, which isn't necessarily true to life at all. It's just what I'm used to. And so I think I missed Laura being a little bit more Spitfire-like.
18:08 Speaker 05 Yes.
18:08 Linda Holmes? I also think they have too many nice clothes.
18:10 Speaker 05 Oh, my gosh.
18:12 Linda Holmes? To me, I just felt that they had too many different dresses that were too fancy for people who would be spending most of their time, as Soraya was talking about, doing chores. They seem to have a big supply of very nice dresses.
18:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's beautifully shot. Yeah, it's like. Pa is the one who, right, in addition to building this house, is also the carpenter who is making the furniture that's going in the house. I would like to see maybe a few more calluses.
18:41 Speaker 02 Yes, and this definitely is a little bit more polished, a little bit more pretty. The people who live in Independence, some of them have way more than Nellie Olsen ever did on the original TV series. Some of them seem to have a great deal of abundance and luxury in their homes and their wardrobes and so on. But yeah, I can totally see what you're saying there. I also thought a little bit about that. We don't necessarily see quite as much being hungry. Like so much of the original books.
19:10 Speaker 05 Yes.
19:11 Speaker 02 If you think about the original books, a lot of them are essentially food porn. It's just like Laura Ingalls Wilder going on and on about butter or explaining the pleasures of maple syrup going on for pages about that.
19:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
19:25 Speaker 02 And there's less fixation on the food in this. And the food in the books, as an adult rereading them, I was like, this is about food scarcity. Yeah, this is about hunger.
19:35 Linda Holmes? And I think in this show, the poverty of the family is introduced as something that the parents are keeping from the girls for the majority of the story. The parents are not telling the girls that they're having money problems.
19:47 Speaker 02 Right.
19:48 Linda Holmes? I suspect that they would know they had money problems because of the kinds of things that Kristen's talking about, that if you didn't have consistent food available, you would probably know that.
20:02 Speaker 02 Yes. Unlike the 1970s TV show, this new series, though, is showing that the family is constantly in debt to the general store. The old TV show in the 1970s, they keep repeating, Pa would never be in debt. And that's something they talk about constantly on the 1970s show is Cash on the Barrel. And on this show, it's like, no. It's much more true to what really happened in Laura Ingalls Wilder's life. Pa was always in debt.
20:29 Linda Holmes? Yeah.
20:29 Speaker 02 Pa was not good with money and Pa was poor at the same time. Both those things were true.
20:34 Linda Holmes? Well, and had a way of getting the family in over their head. And I think that's similar to what you were talking about with him being somewhat reckless is that I think the TV show that I watched growing up was very devoted to its heroic vision of Pa in a way that would have made it very difficult to acknowledge that his decision making, not just once, but sort of continually had the family struggling to survive because of decisions that he made. And I do like the way they portray this marriage where ultimately she really has to say to him, like, it is not acceptable for you to keep things from me and to not tell me what's really going on and to mislead me about how secure we are or aren't with all this land business
21:19 Linda Holmes? that's going on.
21:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:20 Speaker 05 And that you have family back in Wisconsin, right? Who's saying, you're gonna have a baby out here in the middle of almost nowhere? Like, come back with the children? That element of precarity that you really can, you could die out there.
21:34 Linda Holmes? It's surprising how much when you hear the sister being like, you don't want to have a baby in this situation. It's like, I see that too.
21:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. It is pointed out, it's, you are a man, Charles, who has a wife and two little girls. You didn't come out here with some brothers or some dudes from your hometown? You're really gonna chop down trees and erect a house without the help of any other men? You're just gonna do this on your own?
22:00 Speaker 05 And your wife until she becomes injured.
22:02 Speaker 02 Yes. And she's pregnant.
22:05 Speaker 05 Oh, that's hard.
22:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's really tough. And even though the show does frequently show the Ingalls family as all heroes and the best of the town, the smartest, the most competent people in the town, I do hope the show continues to also depict all the flaws of Pa.
22:20 Linda Holmes? By the time this was a collaboration between Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter, I guess, by the time it gets filtered through all of that, you're getting the family legend, right? And that's another thing, in addition to kind of the centering of this family in this. Story of kind of the West, quote unquote. It's also the fact that the original source of all this is a member of the family. Like, who can write a sort of a no holds barred biography of their family even if they wanted to, which I don't think she particularly wanted to because it's a children's books, right? So, yeah, I think they're working uphill against a few factors here, but it's a solid effort. I liked it better by the end than I did at the beginning.
23:02 Linda Holmes? It grew on me by the end of these eight episodes. So I think we all have some respect for what they're trying to do here. Tough battle to make this feel as relevant as I think they'd like it to be, but I think we all have things that we liked about this. So that brings us to the end of our show. Krista Minzer, Soraya Nadia McDonald, thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad we talked about this.
23:23 Speaker 05 Likewise. Thank you.
23:25 Speaker 02 Thank you.
23:26 Linda Holmes? This episode is produced by Hafsa Fathama and Mike Katsif and edited by our showrunner, Jessa Haridi. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll see you all next time.
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23:47 Speaker 07 This weekend up first, we're in the final days before the midterm elections. And this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. We're going to follow it day by day through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, Kevin, it feels good to be back. It sure does, Casey. And what a time. The world is talking about AI and what's going on in Silicon Valley, and we are here with a new show to tell you all about it. That's right, Kevin. On our new show, Machine Gods, twice a week, we'll be bringing you the biggest news in tech and bring you unmatched access to the real titans of this industry.
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