"Little House on the Prairie" reboot coming to NETFLIX

[Khan]

Unfortunately, I suspect "Taylor Sheridan" is just what the team in charge is going for. 

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It's been years since I've watched anything on Netflix, and that's down to the same issue I have with many streamers: quantity over (good) quality.  So much of what gets produced today is just so dreary to me.  Most of it is heavy, and plodding, and in those cases when the shows have anything to do with our military, they're also patriotic to the point of becoming propaganda.  I've kind of resigned myself to watching classic TV I can find on Pluto.

For sure, there are aspects of the novels that feel very "pro-whites," but I think that's to be expected, given how little white people still knew or understood about non-Caucasians in general when the books were first published.  But do I think Laura Ingalls Wilder was trying to indoctrinate school children and others into white supremacy, like Thomas Dixon, Jr., who wrote the novel upon which "The Birth of a Nation" was based?  Frankly, I think she was just telling (fictionalized) stories from her childhood.

Edited February 3 by Khan

[DRW50]

I think you're right. There's criticism if you try too much to put the past into context for media, but I see it that way more than Ingalls trying to be racist the way the Charlie Kirks or the world are now.

Most streaming material is slop. The one I hear the most praise of (Apple TV) is the least watched. I enjoy some shows on Netflix, but even those (like Bridgerton) I know aren't actually good - just some good casting and pretty costumes. I'd want more than that for Little House.

[Khan]

I agree.  People tend to forget that every work is a product of its' time.  If you look at anything that was written or produced even 10 years ago through the lens of 2024/2025, it's not going to hold up well, because norms and attitudes are always in flux.

I still remember when I showed my friends in NYC "The Philadelphia Story," and they objected right away to the opening scene where Cary Grant shoves Katharine Hepburn to the ground by her face after she breaks one of his golf clubs.  "You have to remember that this was 1940," I said, "and back then, misogyny just wasn't on a lot of people's radars. 

"Besides, the scene needed a 'button,' and how else was Dexter supposed to respond to Tracy breaking his golf club?  Any other ending to that scene would've been anticlimactic."

Personally, I would feel more outraged if the producers of this reboot decided to go the Shonda Rhimes/"Bridgerton" route and have their cast be more racially and ethnically diverse, just so someone could make some points about inclusivity.  It'd look really silly and too "try hard," for example, to have a Charles Ingalls who's Asian, married to a Caroline who's Black, with no one in Walnut Grove acknowledging their biracial marriage or "Blasian" children.

Edited February 3 by Khan

[te.]

Ultimately, it comes down to being interested in your characters and the story you're telling. Again - if they are going to go for some inclusivity in this adaptation, then it needs to do more than just check boxes. As you said, by all means - do change Charles to black and Caroline to Asian with blasian children... but then you have a different product to what the books were in the first place as the surrounding world would certainly react to such a pairing at the time. 

Of course, the original show is criticized for being too cutesy and glossing over hardships of the times, on the other hand does anyone really want to watch an ongoing tv show about how horrible and rough life was at the time? Maybe as a miniseries or a succession of movies at most. But even today I'm not sure we want full-on realism. 

[All My Shadows]

Which is funny because the show had hardships aplenty, and some criticize it for being one tragedy after another. It really was somewhere in the middle, and part of its appeal is that you can tune in for something purely goofy and silly like "Fred" and then tune in for something so heartbreaking and poignant like "The Wisdom of Solomon" in the same season. Then, the following season, you can get something melodramatic like "Whisper Country" and then something sweet and low-key like "I Remember, I Remember."

[te.]

I think what people are complaining is the nature of episodic television - ie a tragedy can happen in one episode and then you sort of have a happy-go-lucky episode next and all those things that happened in the previous one are all but forgotten and rarely do we get a follow up. But on the other hand... episodic television makes for great streaming. You can sort of tune out when something doesn't overly interest you and go back in when something does. 

 

But it's something that I suspect will be an issue today. I cannot see today's audiences tolerating a new production that's so openly and brazenly not adhering to normal serialization. Some of these episodic episodes play out during a couple of months from memory, so in my head I've always imagined that the shorter stories happens in-between those episodes that has a longer time span (if that makes sense).