It’s a story with covered wagons and one room schoolhouses, but showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine says the “Little House on the Prairie” remake for Netflix still speaks to today’s American dream.The show, premiering Thursday and set in the late 1800s, follows the Ingalls family led by Charles and Caroline and their two daughters Mary and Laura — as they settle in the American frontier. It’s adapted from a series of semi-autobiographical books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her own family’s pioneer life. In 1974, Michael Landon co-created the TV series based on the books where he played Pa alongside Melissa Gilbert as Laura. It aired for nine seasons. In the new version, Luke Bracey plays Pa and Alice Halsey is Laura.Sonnenshine says the same frontier spirit from back then is baked into how Americans see themselves, even today.“This idea of rugged individualism is the cornerstone of American mythos,” Sonnenshine says. “It’s still manifesting in our lives constantly … We’re real go-getters.”
In “Little House,” we see the Ingalls family seeking land and opportunity as they move west. In real life, Sonnenshine says, those settlers often didn’t understand what they were part of.“There was no CNN or up-to-date newspapers, telling you” what was really happening, she says. “They did not understand the politics of land ownership or these treaties that have been made or these reservations,” she said. In the show, we see Charles begin to grasp the politics at play as the family encounters the Osage Nation and their new neighbors — and keeps some of that to himself. Sonnenshine says “it’s not out of malice, exactly” but because “knowledge did not flow as freely as it does now.”
