What Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie remake says about today’s culture wars

Time to dust off the gingham: Netflix is about to release a new adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved frontier stories. The series will revisit Little House on the Prairie (1935), the best-known of her books.

For nearly a century, Wilder’s fictionalised accounts of her experiences on the American frontier in the 1870s and 1880s have been a staple of American culture. Her iconic children’s books – eight volumes originally published from 1932 to 1943 – quickly found an eager global audience. Together, they’ve sold over 73 million copies and indelibly shaped a popular image of a certain place and time in American life.

American filmmaker Michael Landon’s equally beloved television adaptation of the books hasn’t left syndication since its first run from 1974 to 1983. During the pandemic, it experienced a new resurgence that has yet to abate: in 2024 alone, it racked up 13.3 billion streaming minutes.

But how will a new generation of viewers respond to the Ingalls family and their experiences of life in an America that was still taking shape?

Besides the resurgent streaming figures, there are signs that this might be a fertile moment to reimagine life on the prairie. Whether in the 1930s or the 1970s, Little House on the Prairie has always thrived in times of depression and turmoil. Indeed, with uncanny timing, Landon’s adaptation premiered in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. Petrochemical trauma apparently stimulates a longing for the age of the horse.

In moments of global suffering, Wilder’s prairie seems to offer a vision of simplicity that serves as an antidote to the turbulence of modern life – it even provided some with a blueprint for COVID lockdown life. Wilder’s knack of transforming rural privation into cosy domesticity is also likely to chime with our own era’s fixation with tradwives, momfluencers, homestead cosplayers and cottage core aesthetics.

The real Little House on the Prairie

The real story of Wilder and her family as they journeyed through Minnesota, Kansas and South Dakota was not so simple or wholesome. They experienced profound hardships including poverty, sickness and periods of near starvation.

Moreover, the novels’ dehumanising representations of the Osage glossed over the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by Wilder’s family and their fellow “pioneers”. They perpetuated the racist stereotypes through which this dispossession was justified. There was little romance, either, about the continuing hardships of Wilder’s life in Missouri – until she published Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the series, at the age of 65.

Even then, Wilder’s success was not a spontaneous fluke. Her only child, Rose Wilder Lane, had managed to escape farm life in Missouri to become one of America’s highest paid freelance writers. She was contributing articles to the era’s leading magazines and writing controversial biographies of public figures like Herbert Hoover and Charlie Chaplin. It was Rose who encouraged her mother to shape her childhood memoirs into fiction and the two women collaborated closely on the series.

But Rose didn’t just bring her literary connections and publishing experience to the mother-daughter partnership: she also brought her politics.

Rose was a prime mover in the early Libertarian movement. Along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Patterson, William F. Buckley labelled her one of the “three furies” of Libertarianism. With Rose’s input, Laura’s childhood memories were transformed into fantasies of American resilience, resourcefulness and self-reliance that chimed with her own political viewpoints.

The result enshrined a vision of the frontier, and by extension America, as a place defined by an exceptional freedom — but only for white settlers. Indeed, anger over Wilder’s treatment of Indigenous and Black characters has only grown over time. In 2018, the backlash led the American Library Association to remove Wilder’s name from its prestigious children’s literature award.

Little House on the Prairie was therefore explicitly and implicitly political from the start. Landon’s television adaptation happily continued that tradition, though his vision of prairie life would have likely angered Rose.

Even if its nostalgic presentation of frontier life hardly troubled the Wilders’ original vision, it still took on social issues germane to the 1970s, including racism and sexual assault. These competing legacies were brought into stark relief when Netflix announced its new adaptation in January 2025.

US political commentator and media personality Megyn Kelly took to X to declare: “Netflix, if you woke-ify ‘Little House on the Prairie’ I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” Melissa Gilbert, the actor who played protagonist Laura in the 1970s, was quick to respond. She urged Kelly to “watch the original again. TV doesn’t get too much more ‘woke’ than we did”.

The Little House in the culture wars

Netflix’s new adaptation will have to find its own place in the contemporary culture wars.

Its multi-racial cast signals a clear attempt to address the racism found in the original books. Pre-publicity from Netflix has been at pains to highlight that the show has hired an Osage cultural consultant and engaged the Osage Nation in discussion. As a result, the series also introduces a family of Indigenous homesteaders, reflecting how the Indian Homestead Act of 1875 offered Indigenous people the chance to settle on farmland in the so-called “public domain”.

In reality, though, taking up such land came at a high cost: Indigenous people were required to give up their tribal affiliations and deeply held beliefs in communal land ownership. As a result, families like this would have been rare in the period depicted – and far more likely to have been forced off their own lands than to have claimed new ones.

At the same time, the sun-drenched, prairie-chic aesthetic of the so-called town of Independence will no doubt appeal to those looking for Insta-worthy images of the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape. The trailer lingers over endless seas of golden-green grass in which pinafored children frolic aesthetically.

If early signs are anything to go by, then, it seems it will try to appeal to both its competing constituencies. These inherent tensions mean that a new adaptation of Wilder’s stories is certainly an appropriate way to mark America’s 250th anniversary year. There are few stories that sit more squarely in the American grain. For good and ill, Little House On the Prairie is the story of America.

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