Little House on the Prairie strolls onto Netflix on July 9.
By Elazar Abrahams
I did not go into Netflix’s new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie with much personal connection to the series. I’m too young to have grown up with the original TV series, though I know it was one of my mother’s favorites, and my relationship to the books is mostly limited to childhood osmosis and a vague memory of some gross frontier detail involving a pig-bladder ball. So if you’re looking for a lifelong devotee to weigh this new version against the sacred text, that won’t be this review. But maybe that helped me enjoy these eight episodes for what they are.
Coming in without a deep attachment to one specific version of the Ingalls story, I was pretty impressed. The show is based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous semi-autobiographical books and follows Charles and Caroline Ingalls (mostly referred to as Pa and Ma), played by Luke Bracey and Crosby Fitzgerald, as they bring their daughters Laura and Mary, played by Alice Halsey and Skywalker Hughes, from Wisconsin to Kansas to build a life near Independence. The family drama and dynamics are what drive the survival tale and origin story of the American West.
I’m usually averse to period pieces. The world of costume dramas, Victorian manners, Jane Austen adaptations, and even something like Bridgerton is generally not my thing. Yet the more I watched of Little House, the more I was taken with its sturdy and compelling story, that has just enough interesting historical texture to keep one hooked.
The show makes a smart choice by not treating the westward expansion as simple pioneer mythmaking. Yes, the Ingalls family is still the emotional center, but this version spends a significant amount of time on the Osage people already living on the land the settlers are trying to claim. What are our protagonists to do when they set up shop on land they were told was “free,” and only afterwards encounter the native peoples who have long called the prairie home?
That perspective is what makes the series feel less like a dusty remake and more like a worthwhile retelling. The hardships of frontier life are only magnified by asking harder questions about who gets to call land home, whose survival stories get romanticized, and what it means when one family’s dream of a fresh start is tied to another community’s displacement. It also does this with more nuance than I expected. The Osage characters are not presented as one monolithic viewpoint. Some are more willing to work with the settlers, while others are more openly furious about what is happening. The show does not reduce the issue to “both sides,” because that would be the wrong framework, but it does give different characters different responses to an impossible situation.
The Ingalls family is well cast and the cornerstone of the series. Halsey and Hughes are both very good as Laura and Mary. They are cute without being cloying, and they give the show a real emotional center. That becomes especially clear when they share scenes with other child actors who are a little rougher around the edges. Halsey, in particular, has the right mix of curiosity, stubbornness, and emotional openness for Laura. Hughes gives Mary a softer, more careful presence, and the contrast between the sisters is simple but effective.
Bracey and Fitzgerald are also strong as Pa and Ma. The show gives both of them their own arcs as they try to integrate into a small, fragile community and build a life that may or may not actually be possible. Pa has the optimism and restlessness of a man always looking toward the next horizon, while Ma has to carry the emotional and practical burden of turning that dream into something livable. The series is at its best when it understands that this family’s love is not separate from their hardship. It is what keeps them going through it.
The more you watch, the more you care about these children surviving, and that may be the biggest compliment I can give the season. Eight hours of frontier struggle could easily become repetitive, but the show finds a steady rhythm. There are illnesses, dangers, community tensions, family disagreements, and questions of belonging, and while not every storyline is equally tantalizing, the season becomes more compelling as the emotional stakes settle in.
My biggest issue is the craft. For a show about the American frontier and the prairie, Little House often feels too, well, little! The sets can be corny, especially in the town scenes, which sometimes look like they were shot on a generic “cowboy movie” backlot. There’s the saloon. There’s the bank. There are signs that say “Saloon” and “Bank.” You get the idea. Even when the costumes and production design are period-appropriate, the whole thing sometimes has that unmistakable Netflix sheen, where everything is lit and framed in a way that makes it feel like streaming content rather than a fully lived-in world.
That is a shame, because this story should be visually sweeping. We should feel the danger of the wolves, the beauty of the rushing rivers, and scale of the prairie. We should get those breathtaking frontier images that make you understand why people were seduced by the promise of manifest destiny. Instead, the cinematography is flat, and the production sometimes tips into soap opera territory. The material is strong enough to carry it, but the visual execution never rises to the level of the story being told.
Still, I kept watching and caring. The new Little House on the Prairie has real limitations and production issues, but it justifies its existence with an exciting debut season.
I give Little House on the Prairie a B+.
