The classic Michael Landon drama ‘Little House on the Prairie’ will get a reboot on a major streaming platform.
There are some classic shows that I just wish Hollywood would leave alone. As I write this, an old Twilight Zone episode is playing in the background. Producers have tried several times over the years to recapture the magic of that series and no attempt has come close to the original. Netflix is now going to try to recapture the magic of the NBC drama Little House on the Prairie.
As The Hollywood Reporter put it, “The 19th century Ingalls family is getting a 21st century TV life.”
I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie. I watched new episodes when they first aired. Over the years, I watched reruns when they aired before cable television gave me more choices. I watched the show enough that it seems like I got my fill of it. It wasn’t a bad show at all and there were plenty of funny, poignant moments.
But if I’m flipping through channels and I see an episode of ‘Little House,’ I’m probably not going to stop and watch it.
The original went out with a bang
Maybe part of it is the television movie that served as its finale. In 1984’s Little House: The Last Farewell, a land tycoon ends up buys all the land under the town of Walnut Grove. Forced to leave their homes, the townsfolk decide to dynamite the whole town. So we got to the townsfolk blow all of the familiar buildings — the mercantile, the restaurant, Laura Wilder’s Victorian home and others — to smithereens.
As the story goes, Landon wanted to make sure it truly was the final picture. As another story goes, the production crew had a deal with the landowner that they’d remove every trace of the standing sets. So they were going to have to demolish anyway.
(I rather buy the former argument. It’d be a lot easier to clear out sets that were not in tiny pieces.)
In any case, after 10 years of watching, it felt like we were being cheated to have to watch everything go ka-boom!
But it sounds like this one might be different
Its showrunner says the books by Laura Ingalls Wilder — the books they based the show on — inspired her to “become a writer and a filmmaker.” That passion could be a good sign, of course. If she loves the work that much, she will likely bring that passion and enthusiasm to the reboot.
But I noticed this line in the story:
The new take on Little House will be, per Netflix, “part hopeful family drama, part epic survival tale, and part origin story of the American West” that will serve up a “kaleidoscopic view of the struggles and triumphs of those who shaped the frontier.”
When I see “new take,” I assume it will be different from the “old take.” (Otherwise, Netflix could save the production costs and just show the reruns.)
Like most works adapted from books to the screen, things don’t always match up. Television and movies take “creative liberties” with original works routinely. Even if this “reboot” is more true to Wilder’s original books, it’ll potentially be quite different from what you and I might have grown up with.
That may not be a bad thing, especially for younger audiences that haven’t seen the original. It may be a way to pull them into Wilder’s world in a way the original series might not be able to. I’m sure those younger audiences are the target for a reboot, anyway.
For the rest of us, when we have a show we remember fondly, we may not want a new version. We don’t want new faces replacing those from our childhood.
We just want the memories of what we once enjoyed.
Maybe that’s because in the back of our mind, we know it’d be next to impossible to live up to what our sense of nostalgia has built up the show to be.
