There’s something not-quite-palpable in the air of late; an apparently genuine worry from Hollywood that if it doesn’t start feeding familiar shapes and images to the people who have most recently grasped the steering wheel of the endlessly skidding school bus called America, they might be in for a very rough time. “Y’all like Little House On The Prairie, right?” they ask the teeming masses. “Y’all like the one with the little house?”
Which is to say: Variety reports that Netflix has just issued a green light to a modern version of Little House, the Laura Ingalls Wilder book series that spawned 9 seasons of Michael Landon spouting folksy wisdom for his various children and neighbors. The new series is being developed by Rebecca Sonnenshine, an executive producer on The Boys, which is, admittedly, not the sort of C.V. we typically associate with down-home country folk. (Although it’s worth remembering that the final Little House movie ended with the simple, gentle folk of Walnut Grove dynamiting their own town all to shit to spite a wealthy land baron, which does sound like it might have come out of the Billy Butcher playbook.) Sonnenshine will showrun the series as well as executive produce, the latter alongside Trip Friendly, son of original Little House producer Ed Friendly.
Is this Yellowstone‘s fault? It seems possible: The logline for the new series mentions that it’s “Part hopeful family drama, part epic survival tale, and part origin story of the American West,” which sounds a lot like all those various streaming historical spin-offs with Taylor Sheridan’s rustic thumbprint all over them. Sonnenshine, at least, sounds like a true believer, saying in a statement that, “I fell deeply in love with these books when I was five years old. They inspired me to become a writer and a filmmaker, and I am honored and thrilled to be adapting these stories for a new global audience with Netflix.” Nielsen recently reported that the 200-plus episodes of Little House have been doing gangbusters on streaming over the past year, garnering “13.25 billion viewing minutes on Peacock” in 2024. No word yet on casting, or which poor sap is going to doom themselves by inviting direct comparisons to Michael Landon’s iconic set of immaculately kept frontier curls.
