ERIC ZACHANOWICH/NETFLIX
Netflix is going back 50 years for its newest project, a reboot of Little House on the Prairie, last seen on TV in 1974. That series itself was based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder book series published in 1935. So yes, we are approaching a 100-year-old story.
Little House on the Prairie has debuted on Netflix at #2, behind only the ever-present Worst Neighbor Ever true crime anthology. That’s higher than the well-performing I Will Find You, the latest season of Sullivan’s Crossing and the 100% scored Dark Winds.
Little House on the Prairie has its own Rotten Tomatoes score in, and it currently sits at a good, perhaps not incredible 77% among critics with a few dozen reviews in so far. The audience score is a lower 61%, but there are only a tiny number of reviews in there, and few have likely watched it all the way through yet.
One of the more interesting aspects of the series is a cast full of almost complete unknowns. This may not be true for everyone, but as hooked-in as I am to movies and TV series, I do not recognize a single name on this list for the Ingalls family or the supporting characters. The actress playing young Mary Ingalls is named Skywalker Hughes, which is just fantastic.
Not that this is the only reason why, but such a move would help keep costs down for a series like this, rather than filling it with a bunch of names. We don’t know the show’s budget, but after looking into this, I found an interesting note that,10 years ago in 2016, Paramount actually killed a Little House on the Prairie movie because it had a proposed budget of $45 million, which was deemed too high. Now, some shows go through that in two episodes, though likely not this one.
The synopsis for Little House on the Prairie is about as basic as you get: “The Ingalls family lives and works on a farm in Midwestern America during the late 19th century.” So, not a whole lot of epic gunfights for this Western, a rarity in the genre, but there’s a reason the property has stood the test of time. I was wondering if the original series also had a Rotten Tomatoes score, which it does not from critics, though audiences give it a 95%. The few that bothered to log in and vote on a 50-year-old show, that is.
We’ll see how it performs on Netflix. It doesn’t seem poised to be some enormous breakout hit, but who knows? The biggest successes on streaming can often come from unlikely places.
