(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE")
ALICE HALSEY: (As Laura Ingalls) Once upon a time, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura left their house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
From the Big Woods to Kansas, "Little House On The Prairie" is back on Netflix. It's a classic series of books from the 1930s, written by Laura Ingalls Wilder and adapted for television in the 1970s. In both, the Ingalls family forges West in a covered wagon to build their own little homestead on the prairie, reckoning with Mother Nature, Native Americans and each other along the way. It's a story that sounded very different in the 1930s than in the 1970s, than it does now to many modern ears. So we wanted to hear from NPR critic Linda Holmes about this updated version. Hi, Linda.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Hello, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hello. OK, so I personally did not really get into the 1970s series when I was a little kid, but I have been glued to this Netflix series now. Though I understand that you have a pretty deep connection to the original TV series. Tell me about that.
HOLMES: Yeah, I grew up watching that show as a kid. I was very attached to the character of Laura. She was the younger sister, which I also was, got in trouble a little bit, had kind of big feelings about everything. I think I related a lot to that. And it was a show that was syndicated from very early on. So you could watch it a lot. It was a comfort show for me.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, I want to talk about this new version of the series on Netflix now because when it was announced, there was a lot of chatter about how to adapt this story and preserve what's good about it while also, bringing, you know, like, a more nuanced understanding to what the Ingalls were actually doing because, of course, this is a story about Westward expansion, meaning they were not the first people making homes on the land that they settled on, right?
HOLMES: Absolutely. And, you know, there's been a real effort to think critically about these books, even though they've been so popular. And yes, not only are there very dehumanizing things said about some of the Indigenous people in the books, but the whole project is, of course, centering the Ingalls and their struggles. And the people behind the new Netflix show made an obviously genuine effort to account for some of that. They include the story of an Osage family, and they do a lot more to contextualize what the Ingalls, as you said, were actually part of as squatters. They also involved Osage people in making the show. They had consultants and writers. And so I think this is probably the best case scenario for this material. With that said, it's always going to be a story that centers this family, even as it includes other people.
CHANG: Exactly. But let me ask you, at the same time, do you think there is a danger of going, like, too woke, for lack of a better word? Did the show find a balance, you think?
HOLMES: You know, it's always interesting when you see that complaint, and then you realize that what's happening is not some kind of forced inclusion, but it's an end to exclusion. For instance, there's a Black doctor in the Netflix show named Dr. Tann. And I suspect the people who make this complaint would say, oh, you know, they've self-consciously inserted this Black doctor to make the cast more diverse. But that doctor was a real person. He delivered one of the Ingalls' girls, and he's in the books. So if a choice was made to leave him out of other adaptations, I think that's the decision to ask questions about.
CHANG: Totally. Well, what about the core characters in this Netflix series? Like, are they pretty true to the original TV series from the '70s, or do they give us more to learn?
HOLMES: You know, I found that it took a little time for this show to differentiate the girls from each other. The affection I had for Laura is a little bit more of a rough-and-tumble kid. You don't get as much at the beginning. I think that's partly because they spend more time on the complexities of the relationship between Charles and Caroline, Pa and Ma. Charles makes some choices for the family that don't work out well, and I think the show tries to be a little tougher on him and on the effect that has on the marriage, so there's kind of more marriage stuff. But eventually, I think they get to a good place with the whole family.
CHANG: Well, for better or for worse, Americans have been following the Ingalls family for - what? - almost a century now. So let me just ask you, what do you think is the lasting fascination that keeps people coming back to this family?
HOLMES: You know, I think people like a warm family story. Partly, it's just that. But I do think there's an element of false nostalgia that makes people suspect that things were always better before. It sounds kind of romantic sitting around with, you know, minimal possessions listening to somebody play the fiddle.
CHANG: (Laughter).
HOLMES: And I think that's why it's good when adaptations like this one take some time to stress how hard life really was and how much of it was work and that a lot of people who think they would have loved that probably would not have.
CHANG: (Laughter) Very true. I know I would not have. I would not be able to cut it. Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Linda Holmes, thank you so much.
HOLMES: Thank you, Ailsa. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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