Netflix Little House on the Prairie Book Adaptation, The Boys Parallel

Some stories refuse to remain 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 modified, the way 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 tackle superheroes, will not be immediately obvious. But for showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine, who’s leading the Netflix adaptation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic and was a author, producer and executive producer on the Prime Video hit, the distinct ways they cross over couldn’t be more apparent. 

“I actually consider them as very similar,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s in regards to the myth of America and the stories we tell ourselves.”

Alongside reading Wilder’s book series, essays and columns, Sonnenshine read a more moderen tackle Wilder’s life — Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser — as a part of her research for the series. Published around the identical 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 the way that shapes who we expect we’re and the way we live our lives.”

“We’re still grappling with all the identical things all these years later,” she tells THR. “So when [adapting Little House on the Prairie] got here up, I used to be like, yes, that is the time to do it, because we’re continuously in a myth. America is a myth-maker. It’s all the time telling myths about itself, and it really aspects into all of the books. It’s actually an element of our culture now. That’s what we do. It’s an infinite, fascinating cycle to re-examine where we were then in relation to where we at the moment are.”

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 points of Wilder’s first book, Little House within the Big Woods. 

“I believe the explanation we didn’t start with Big Woods is that I knew I might reference it quite a bit, [and] the reality is, that book is incredibly episodic. There’s no real story, and the women are very, very young. There’s just not quite enough,” she explains of the choice to start out with the third book in Wilder’s Little House series. “I felt prefer it was higher as a spot to attract detail and emotional texture from, versus attempting to make a story out of that, as I’m not totally sure that’s a season’s price of television.”

Despite a pivot within the book order for the primary season, the series’ long game is to “go book by book. That’s the plan,” Sonnenshine says. And the incontrovertible fact that Big Woods “doesn’t have an entire lot of forward movement” doesn’t mean the show ignores its significance. Noting several popular Big Woods moments among the many 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 “in a position to draw from it.” 

“I teased out a whole lot of the good memories from [Big Woods], and I proceed to return and reference that book, because I like the book,” she says. “There’s a lot — grandma and grandpa, the brother — which might be 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 tough realities of the Ingalls settling in post-Civil War Kansas but in addition more closely interrogates each Wilder’s and America’s own recollections of the Western expansion. Across eight episodes, the roles and community of girls, people of color and even those disabled by the war are explored inside storylines about class politics, frontier corruption and land squatting on the Osage Reserve. 

Caroline is reimagined, with a more distinguished 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 greater 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, amongst others. 

The result isn’t a hardened, boot-strapping myth of self-reliance but a hotter, more reflective tackle a rustic built by coming together. It’s an endeavor the showrunner has been all in favour of tackling since her childhood, after developing a special connection to Wilder’s beloved books. 

“I’ve all the time loved these books. They were the primary books I ever read. I began reading once I was five, so that they really shaped my sense of storytelling and vision of cinema in my head,” the Little House showrunner says. “I felt very connected to those kids. They were in my bones, and I knew them backwards and forwards. I wrote them time and again and once more before I ever saw the [1974] show. I just read them and skim 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 used to be like, ‘Mom, the show isn’t just like the books, but I intend to make these books into something that feel just like the books, that folks can watch,’” she recalls. “Once I was very young after which as an adult, I believe it inspired me to go to film school in a whole lot of ways and change into a author.” 

But how exactly does one tackle adapting Wilder’s beloved semi-autobiographical Little House books? A previous 1974 adaptation set in Walnut Grove — the situation 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 amongst those that returned from the series to again deliver their very own popular spin on the best-selling novels. 

Sonnenshine notes that her Netflix adaptation will lean into the books, actual history and inventive liberties to inform its version, with the understanding that what Wilder recalled and what history records can often be selective facts or their very own types of fiction. 

“We didn’t have TikTok. Our information is filtered down through popular culture, literature [and] newspaper articles which have an agenda,” the showrunner tells THR. “Obviously, there’s all the time been an incredible diversity of ideas on this country, and I do consider that [Wilder] was aware of these items. She began writing these books in 1932, and that was long after she lived them. It’s writing throughout the Depression [and] after the frontier has closed. What I need to focus on is that it wasn’t just that everybody was a racist and everybody had these ideas. It’s not true, so it was attempting to break through in small ways.”

That approach may not all the time sit well with book fans and even those preferring a more rigid tackle accuracy of their historical fiction. However the showrunner notes that what audiences consider they know isn’t all the time the entire (continuously undocumented) truth. More importantly, her imagining of Little House on the Prairie isn’t designed to be a take a look at the past but more about its parallels with our present. 

“Photographs were so artificial. People weren’t snapping photos throughout. What I attempt to do is break down this barrier of pondering that is an old-timey show, and also you’re watching people up to now. It’s like we’re searching 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 searching through a window, and also you’re seeing something very contemporary because putting a wall between you and the past in popular culture creates this sense of, ‘Well that’s not me right away,’ and I need us to grasp the exchange of ideas and the way we’re really not so different than we were then.”

Little House on the Prairie is now streaming on Netflix.