Little House on the Prairie

TV-PG • Netflix

After the end of the Civil War, the Ingalls family felt the Big Woods of Wisconsin was growing too crowded for them. So Ma and Pa don their pioneer spirit, pack up a covered wagon with their young girls, Mary and Laura, and head southwest to the great plains of Kansas to stake their claim.

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie adapts Laura’s beloved autobiographical novel in this first season, and a second season is already slated to treat the next exciting chapter of the Ingalls’ adventures. The book series has sold over 70 million copies across more than 100 ­different countries since its first publication during the Great Depression, a testament to the power this story has to warm families’ hearts worldwide as they relax by their hearths in the evening, dreaming of life on the American frontier.

Fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic book will be delighted that the show has retained the innocent childlike curiosity and amazement of its narrator, Laura, featuring an enchanting performance by the young Alice Halsey. Buoyed by her father’s steady presence and his consistent optimism, Laura is determined to charm each new acquaintance she makes out West, and rarely fails to win over her quarry.

Though Laura is brimming with wide-eyed wonder, the show does not limit itself to her perspective. And the adults on the Western frontier offer Pa a more sobering picture of the dangers on the prairie. After witnessing their wagon nearly capsize crossing a river, the town doctor cautions: “It is a myth that men can make it out here alone.”

Compared with the novel’s narrative of the Ingalls’ encounters with wolves, wildfire, and other perils of the wilderness, the show’s suspense is not quite so artful in the telling. However, the simple joys of the family establishing their new home on the frontier are just as wonderful as viewers might hope. Singing hymns under the stars and dancing a jig as Pa plays the fiddle are among the recurrent pleasures in which the series relishes to dwell. Their neighbor Mr. Edwards’ profound sense of peace and belonging in his friendship with the Ingalls creates a familiar kinship between the viewers and our kind hosts as they invite us into this ­chapter of their lives.

The Ingalls have settled in American Indian territory, and the Osage nation plays a more pivotal part in this adaptation. Rather than being relegated to the role of an existential threat on the edge of civilization, the Osage feature as compassionate citizens as well as bitter rivals for their ancestral lands. Laura’s touching friendship with an indigenous girl her own age serves as a poetic bridge between two worlds whose older generations are generally more skeptical about whether they can—or ought—to make peace with one another.

By dwelling on the complexities of the larger narrative of westward expansion, the show loses out on some of the intimate society of the Ingalls under the big sky. Seeing the wide world from little Laura’s perspective is what makes the book so magical, and the series suffers insofar as it departs from her limited capacity to make sense of it all—from contentious small town politics to a contrived family fallout between Pa and his father back in Wisconsin.

But the show’s tone can be best expressed in the impromptu speech that Laura gives at the first Founder’s Day celebration of the town of Independence: “Independence isn’t about self-reliance or liberty or freedom … it’s a place to come together.” Bring the family.