Standing in a chilly soundstage complex in Winnipeg, Manitoba, last fall, Joy Gorman Wettels drifted into a steamy reverie.
Cameras had just stopped rolling on a Christmas Eve scene for Netflix’s new adaptation of “Little House on the Prairie.” Wettels, a producer of the series, had stepped out of Stage C — home to a full-scale log cabin surrounded by a field of faux snow — and wandered into a nearby prop storage area. There, she paused over an ornate rocking chair. In one episode, as in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic book, Pa fashions a rocker from willow saplings for Ma, who is weak with fever.
“Imagine if your hot husband just threw this together,” Wettels said with exaggerated relish. “A guy who can ride a horse and craft a gorgeous rocker and play the fiddle and build a log cabin.”
Then I ruined the moment with a question: Why were we in Winnipeg? Was there no affordable prairie anywhere in America?
Wettels sighed, her expression turning weary, even a little sad. Something about “Little House on the Prairie” always seemed to invite a cultural fight, down to the provenance of the grass. Why couldn’t people simply embrace the romance and ruggedness of the frontier, the way she had moments earlier?
Many viewers undoubtedly will. Arriving on Netflix on Thursday, this “Little House on the Prairie” lavishly evokes life in 1869 Kansas. If the old NBC series starring Michael Landon reveled in tidy moral lessons and homespun theatrics, the new adaptation favors verisimilitude and natural splendor (moody sunsets, purple prairie clover, buzzing insects). Some scenes are almost slow cinema; Terrence Malick’s rapturous “Days of Heaven” (1978) was the production team’s touchstone.
“There was nothing but grass and waves of light and shadow and a giant sky,” Laura recalls in an earnest voice-over in the first episode.
In keeping with the 1935 children’s novel, the third in Wilder’s nine-book series, Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their daughters, Laura and Mary, climb into a covered wagon and leave Wisconsin for what was then called Indian Country. They encounter hardships (raging rivers, wildfire, land swindlers, wolves) as they pursue prosperity and room to breathe, Wisconsin having become downright citified, in Pa’s estimation.
But in a major departure, here the family’s prejudices are challenged and ultimately vanquished by the people they meet, including a prominent Osage family, the Black proprietress of a general store and Dr. George Tann, a successful Black physician.
“I felt there was a real opportunity to unify,” Wettels said. “Let’s make something intelligent and elegant that grandma to the grandchildren, from 8 to 80, would like to watch. To remind the world that we’re better together.”
It’s a nice thought. But “Little House on the Prairie” has long since evolved into a Rorschach test, something onto which Americans project competing ideas about family, race, anxieties and what the country once was, or at least imagines itself to have been. One side sees a wholesome reminiscence about faith, resilience and other bedrock American values, the other a racist story about settler colonialism.
Even something as banal as a bonnet, an easy way for rural women to shield themselves from the weather in Wilder’s day, is no longer just a bonnet. In 2026, they’re caught up in culture-war debates over “tradwives” and recall, for some, the head coverings in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (The show tried to deal with the bonnet issue by using them sparingly and putting Caroline in a variety of historically accurate styles.)
With “Little House” debuting around America’s semiquincentennial, it makes the whole thing only more charged.
“There will unfortunately be criticism from all sides,” Wettels said. “That became clear the minute Netflix unveiled the project.” She appeared to be referring to Megyn Kelly, the right-wing media personality who, after Netflix announced last year that it would “reimagine the beloved story,” wrote on X, “If you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.”
Not all of the Sturm und Drang has been ideological.
“At the moment, the whole internet is raging over Carrie,” Wettels said with an eye roll, referring to the third Ingalls daughter. (Her arrival comes late in the season, so Netflix left her out of marketing materials.)
The other daughters have been aged up, because older child actors are allowed to work longer hours. Mary (Skywalker Hughes) and Laura (Alice Halsey) are 12 and 10 in the series; at the start of Wilder’s book they’re 6 and 4. “That will be another criticism that we’ll have to defend,” Wettels said.
Then she shrugged.
“You ultimately just have to be fearless and make the show you want to make,” she said. “People will love it if they give it a chance.”
A former executive at the production company Anonymous Content, Wettels was one of 12 producers who chased the “Little House” rights in 2020 when Friendly Family Productions, which tightly controls the property, let it be known in Hollywood that it was interested in a fresh take. The Friendly family has held the rights since 1972, when Ed Friendly, a producer, acquired them and developed the NBC series, which began a nine-season run in 1974.
For Friendly’s heirs, a new series offered a chance to right what they viewed as a decades-old wrong: NBC ousted Friendly from the original series after he clashed with Landon, the show’s star. Friendly wanted a faithful adaptation that foregrounded rural poverty and the Ingalls family’s restless migrations in search of a better life. Landon wanted sentimentality (soaring music, teary close-ups) and sermonizing (Pa standing in a field and beseeching God for help, which arrives right on cue). Landon also refused to wear the beard that Friendly considered essential to the character.
Trip Friendly, who became the “Little House” warden after his father died, said Wettels won him over because she shared his vision for a new adaptation: Adhere to Wilder’s books as much as possible, emphasize visual storytelling and greatly expand the presence of Indigenous and Black figures.
“I explained to Joy, ‘Look, this is how I want to approach the material,’” he said in a video interview. “And I got a huge smile on my face, because that’s how she felt also.”
They found their showrunner in Rebecca Sonnenshine, a writer-producer who would seem to be a counterintuitive choice: Her résumé is filled with depraved superheroes (“The Boys”), twisted domesticity (“The Housemaid”), predatory desire (“The Vampire Diaries”) and murderous cults (“Archive 81”).
But she won over the creators by revealing an almost-obsessive interest in Wilder’s books. “I started reading them when I was 5,” Sonnenshine told me. “I was a country kid running around barefoot, and so I really felt connected to Laura.”
“When I was about 10 or so, it hit me,” she added. “Ladies write things and make important cultural contributions too.”
Women wrote six of the eight episodes and directed the entire first season of “Little House,” which largely shifts the center of gravity from Pa to Ma. Caroline Ingalls, played by Crosby Fitzgerald, has the more substantial character arc, starting out as a submissive wife and gradually coming into her own. She faces down predators with a rifle, saves her daughters from drowning, confronts a wealthy racist and discovers that many of her assumptions about the world were wrong.
“Ma has a total shift,” Fitzgerald told me between takes. “She learns that a lot of what she’s been told, in particular about the Osage, are lies based on fear or greed.”
“She’s not just in the background baking pie,” she added. (Karen Grassle, who played Caroline in the NBC series, has long maintained that Landon pushed her character into the background after Grassle asked for a raise.)
Conversely, Charles Ingalls, played by Luke Bracey, a strapping Australian, is written as playful and naïve. “He’s the dreamer, and she’s the doer,” Fitzgerald said. Bracey, standing up after adjusting a tightfitting boot, agreed.
“Our version of the story definitely demystifies the idea of the self-made man,” he said.
In the Christmas Eve scene they had just completed, for instance, Caroline insisted on financial reality as Charles indulged in fantasy. “I’m not ready for them to stop believing in Christmas magic,” Charles told her in a corner of the cabin, as Laura used a scrap of thread to string worn wool socks over the fireplace.
“I don’t know how to make magic out of thin air,” Caroline responded. “The girls are old enough to know that money’s tight.”
In another departure from the books and NBC series, the new “Little House” adds multiple Osage characters. They include Good Eagle, a foil to Laura played by Wren Zhawenim Gotts; her smart and cynical mother, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk); and her mixed heritage father, William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), a pacifist and successful farmer.
For the Osage characters, Sonnenshine said she wanted to “craft a story that would give us insight into who they were and what they were going through but not just as ideas: as people.” The production employed a throng of Indigenous cultural consultants and scholars to ensure “authenticity and sensitivity,” she said.
The changes may come as a surprise to the vast audience that still watches the NBC series in reruns. Last year, “Little House” generated 13 billion minutes of comfort viewing on streaming services like Peacock and Amazon Prime Video and another 6 billion on cable channels like Hallmark, according to Nielsen.
Among the other differences: The deliciously awful Nellie Oleson, a standout character in the NBC series, does not appear in Netflix’s first season. (She’ll arrive in Season 2, which is already in production and follows the Ingalls family to Minnesota.) In a wink to fans of the 1974 show — spoiler alert — Alison Arngrim, the original Nellie, pops up in the new adaptation as a creepy old woman in the woods.
When I asked Sonnenshine if she felt any obligation to cater to fans of the original series, she shook her head.
“It did its thing,” she said. “We’re doing ours.”
Over in the props department, Wettels was chatting with the show’s lead set decorator, James V. Kent, whose credits stretch from “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992) to “The Gilded Age” on HBO. To get the period look of “Little House” just right, the production employed roughly 175 people in its art department, more than double the norm, according to Jonah Markowitz, the lead production designer. Costumers tracked down century-old “death’s head” buttons. One 96,000-pound log cabin was constructed without nails on an outdoor set, and another was built inside Stage C.
“We really wanted to include items shown in the beloved Garth Williams illustrations from the book,” Kent said. “The hardest, by far, was the rocking chair.”
Kent said he and Markowitz had almost given up when they met a woman selling antique brooms at a farmers market near the set. They ended up hiring her to help make the chair.
“She spent days weaving it,” Kent said. “Can you believe our luck?”
Wettels added, dryly: “Welcome to Winnipeg.”
