Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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The similarities between the upcoming family western Little House on the Prairie and The Boys, a dark and violent satirical take on superheroes, may not be immediately obvious. But for showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine, who is leading the Netflix adaptation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic and was a writer, producer and executive producer on the Prime Video hit, the distinct ways they cross over couldn’t be more apparent.
“I really think of them as very similar,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s about the myth of America and the stories we tell ourselves.”
Alongside reading Wilder’s book series, essays and columns, Sonnenshine read a more recent take on Wilder’s life — Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser — as part of her research for the series. Published around the same time she began working on The Boys, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography helped lead Sonnenshine to ponder how “an iconic American piece of literature” and a “subversive comic book” together represent “what we tell ourselves as a story, which is about America, and how that shapes who we think we are and how we live our lives.”
“We’re still grappling with all the same things all these years later,” she tells THR. “So when [adapting Little House on the Prairie] came up, I was like, yes, this is the time to do it, because we’re constantly in a myth. America is a myth-maker. It’s always telling myths about itself, and it really factors into all the books. It’s certainly a part of our culture now. That’s what we do. It’s an endless, fascinating cycle to re-examine where we were then in relation to where we are now.”
The Netflix imagining, which premiered on July 9 and stars Alice Halsey as Laura; Skywalker Hughes as Laura’s older sister, Mary; and Luke Bracey and Crosby Fitzgerald as Pa and Ma Ingalls, largely follows the events of Little House on the Prairie, though it sprinkles in key aspects of Wilder’s first book, Little House in the Big Woods.
“I think the reason we didn’t start with Big Woods is that I knew I would reference it quite a bit, [and] the truth is, that book is incredibly episodic. There’s no real story, and the girls are very, very young. There’s just not quite enough,” she explains of the decision to start with the third book in Wilder’s Little House series. “I felt like it was better as a place to draw detail and emotional texture from, as opposed to trying to make a story out of that, as I’m not totally sure that’s a season’s worth of television.”
Despite a pivot in the book order for the first season, the series’ long game is to “go book by book. That’s the plan,” Sonnenshine says. And the fact that Big Woods “doesn’t have a whole lot of forward movement” doesn’t mean the show ignores its significance. Noting several popular Big Woods moments among the book fans, including the maple syrup candy scene and the moment Pa ties a pig’s bladder and Laura and Mar play ball with it, while talking to THR, the showrunner highlights how the team was “able to draw from it.”
“I teased out a lot of the great memories from [Big Woods], and I continue to go back and reference that book, because I love the book,” she says. “There’s so much — grandma and grandpa, the brother — that are all drawn from that book, and we’ll keep pulling them forward. We meet their family again.”
Sonnenshine’s combined spin on Prairie and Big Woods not only grapples with the harsh realities of the Ingalls settling in post-Civil War Kansas but also more closely interrogates both Wilder’s and America’s own recollections of the Western expansion. Across eight episodes, the roles and community of women, people of color and even those disabled by the war are explored within storylines about class politics, frontier corruption and land squatting on the Osage Reserve.
Caroline is reimagined, with a more prominent part in leading the family on the prairie and addressing her own bigotries and fears. Dr. Tann, a real-life Black doctor who saved the Ingalls from malaria and delivered Laura’s younger sister Carrie, sees his storyline reflect a much bigger presence than his single book mention. The Osage are represented by several characters, including William (Meegwun Fairbrother), White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk) and Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts) Mitchell, roles original to the series and supported through cultural production consultant Julie Okeefe, writing consultant Robert Warrior and language consultant Talee Redcorn, among others.
The result is not a hardened, boot-strapping myth of self-reliance but a warmer, more reflective take on a country built by coming together. It’s an endeavor the showrunner has been interested in tackling since her childhood, after developing a special connection to Wilder’s beloved books.
“I’ve always loved these books. They were the first books I ever read. I started reading when I was five, so they really shaped my sense of storytelling and vision of cinema in my head,” the Little House showrunner says. “I felt very connected to these kids. They were in my bones, and I knew them backwards and forwards. I wrote them over and over and over again before I ever saw the [1974] show. I just read them and read them. I felt like I knew these people, and I felt them.”
As she grew older, Sonnenshine was determined to adapt the books into her own show. “I was like, ‘Mom, the show is not like the books, but I want to make these books into something that feel like the books, that people can watch,’” she recalls. “When I was very young and then as an adult, I think it inspired me to go to film school in a lot of ways and become a writer.”
But how exactly does one tackle adapting Wilder’s beloved semi-autobiographical Little House books? A previous 1974 adaptation set in Walnut Grove — the location of On the Banks of Plum Creek — ran for nine seasons and 200 episodes on NBC. Several TV movies followed, with Melissa Gilbert, Michael Landon, Karen Grassle and Melissa Sue Anderson among those who returned from the series to again deliver their own popular spin on the best-selling novels.
Sonnenshine notes that her Netflix adaptation will lean into the books, actual history and creative liberties to tell its version, with the understanding that what Wilder recalled and what history records can often be selective facts or their own forms of fiction.
“We didn’t have TikTok. Our information is filtered down through pop culture, literature [and] newspaper articles that have an agenda,” the showrunner tells THR. “Obviously, there’s always been an incredible diversity of ideas in this country, and I do believe that [Wilder] was aware of these things. She started writing these books in 1932, and that was long after she lived them. It’s writing during the Depression [and] after the frontier has closed. What I want to highlight is that it wasn’t just that everyone was a racist and everybody had these ideas. It’s not true, so it was trying to break through in small ways.”
That approach may not always sit well with book fans or even those who prefer a more rigid take on accuracy in their historical fiction. But the showrunner notes that what audiences believe they know is not always the whole (frequently undocumented) truth. More importantly, her imagining of Little House on the Prairie isn’t designed to be a look at the past but more about its parallels with our present.
“Photographs were so artificial. People weren’t snapping photos all over. What I try to do is break down this barrier of thinking this is an old-timey show, and you’re watching people in the past. It’s like we’re looking through a window right at ourselves with all our different ideas and all of our different prejudices, senses of purpose or ideas of humanity or faith or love or community,” she says. “You’re looking through a window, and you’re seeing something very contemporary because putting a wall between you and the past in pop culture creates this feeling of, ‘Well that’s not me right now,’ and I want us to understand the exchange of ideas and how we are really not so different than we were then.”
Little House on the Prairie is now streaming on Netflix.
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