One of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s great gifts as a writer was her ability to reconnect, at age sixty-three and beyond, with her childhood sense of wonder and discovery. For readers of her autobiographical “Little House” books, it is pleasurable, if head-spinning, to share in the joy she finds in hard work and family camaraderie amid every hardscrabble pioneer situation. She details the “great fun” of watching Pa butcher a hog, render its lard, and make a balloon toy out of its bladder. In the Ingallses’ sturdy household in the woods of Wisconsin, young Laura is content to play house with pumpkins in the attic during a freezing winter, everything “snug and cosy.” Because Ma and Pa Ingalls are endlessly competent, their kids—and readers—know that, through fire, hunger, howling wolf packs, plagues of grasshoppers, fever ’n’ ague, and worse, know-how will prevail. The 1974 TV adaptation of the series, with Michael Landon as Pa and Melissa Gilbert as Laura, re-created that mood, making the Ingallses’ circa eighteen-seventies pioneer world feel like a comfy escape. It’s idealized, but only just—upon rewatching the pilot, I was relieved that it didn’t feel like smarmy inspirational fare, or like the Hallmark Channel (except in that it is rerun enthusiastically on the Hallmark Channel).
Rebecca Sonnenshine, the creator-showrunner of Netflix’s new adaptation of “Little House on the Prairie,” which has already been renewed for a second season, isn’t going for cozy. A veteran of unsettling works (“The Housemaid,” “Outcast,” “The Vampire Diaries”) who describes herself as “pretty dark,” she doesn’t quite give “Little House” the “Anne with an ‘E’ ” treatment—in 2017, the director Moira Walley-Beckett brought grim gray hues and post-traumatic stress to Netflix’s Green Gables—but she gets close. Sonnenshine, who grew up on a farm, credits Wilder’s books with inspiring her to be a writer. She wants to do justice to them in a new way, with realism and a more adult, if still kid-friendly, perspective. Watching the results, my inner child and I both had a pretty bad time.
Visually, this new “Little House” is beautiful—sunlit vistas, saturated colors, eerily attractive actors. In the very first shot, we hear birds chirping and wind whistling and see a grassy meadow and a wide-brimmed hat. Its wearer, Laura (Alice Halsey), looks up, revealing an angelic face framed by artful tendrils of hair; she’s eight years old but has a glamour that’s unnervingly adult, even if she’s smudged with dirt and aiming a slingshot at a rabbit. “Once upon a time . . .” her whispery voice narrates, trailing off. The rest of the opening sequence isn’t reassuring: Laura and Mary (Skywalker Hughes) have a bratty, tedious exchange (the first of many), and the dreamy voice-over resumes over an expository montage. Mary and dependable, red-haired Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald) seem recognizably real, but Pa (Luke Bracey), tousled and stubbled and wearing a proto-Carhartt jacket, is movie-star handsome and smoothly blasé. He sits by the campfire clutching a broadsheet that says “FREE LAND IN THE WEST: COME FORWARD AND TAKE YOUR HOMESTEADS”; when he plays his fiddle, he looks like an indie rocker making an embarrassing sortie into bluegrass. Unlike Landon’s good looks, which are tempered by his seriousness of purpose, this guy’s suggest that he’s gotten by on charm and might get eaten by a bear. Three minutes in, he nearly drowns his entire family, and it doesn’t come as a total surprise. That sequence, in which Pa attempts to ford a too-deep river in the covered wagon, registers differently in the book and in Landon’s able hands—it’s scary, without undermining your faith in Pa and the whole enterprise. In the Netflix version, the scene approaches terror: horses up to their necks and panicking, little girls flying everywhere, dog floating downstream. When a capable-looking stranger, Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims), rides up to offer help after the Ingallses stagger ashore, you think, Phew—finally, someone who knows what he’s doing.
As the episodes go on, the exquisite cinematography, with its beautiful naïfs bathed in golden light, starts to evoke “Midsommar” before all hell breaks loose. Pa continues to be an untroubled bumbler, leaving Ma and the girls alone at a campsite with just a rifle overnight, terrifying them; while trying to enlist a neighbor, Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie), into helping him build a house, Pa obliviously peppers him with insensitive questions, provoking a violent rage. It’s hard to trust Pa, or to know what Sonnenshine is doing with him, and therefore it’s hard to trust the show. Over time, despite many scenes of Pa fiddling, bonding with “Half-Pint” Laura, and engaging in family fun, he and his particular brand of impulsive bootstrapping can start to seem like a dark metaphor for American history. “I can’t help thinking about what you said—that this land isn’t open for settlement,” he tells Mr. Edwards, as they continue to build a house on it. “You said that it belonged to the Osage. You said they’d be back.” But people are coming from everywhere, Edwards says—“These settlers are like a prairie fire. Prairie fire can’t be stopped”—and who really owns land, anyway? Can’t we all just live in peace?
