Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine takes EW inside her new adaptation of the coming-of-age classic Little House on the Prairie.
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The screenwriter behind The Housemaid and producer on series like The Boys wove together Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved autobiographical novels with real biographical details and historical characters to create the new series.
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But at its heart, Little House 2.0 is an "enduring and heartfelt story about a family who stays together no matter what."
Rebecca Sonnenshine was ready to answer the call of the wild.
"I have this funny story. When I was five, I told my older cousin, 'I can read now,'" the screenwriter and prolific producer recalls. "She was very skeptical. So she said, 'I'm going to give you a book. If you can read the first page, you can have it.' And it wasLittle House in the Big Woods."
She read the first page with aplomb, of course, and the first entry in Laura Ingalls Wilder's enduringly beloved series of autobiographical novels was hers. In that moment, an "obsession" took root that wound its own long, meandering path to the present — Sonnenshine is the showrunner behind Netflix's highly anticipatedLittle House on the Prairiereboot.
The writer ofThe Housemaidand producer on series likeThe Vampire DiariesandThe Boyssat down withEntertainment Weeklyin the run-up to the newLittle House on the Prairie's July 9 premiere to take fans over the river, through the woods, and down the road less traveled to an "enduring and heartfelt story about a family who stays together no matter what."
Sonnenshine'sLittle House on the Prairieisn't strictly a reboot or a revival of the classic series starringMelissa Gilbertas the plucky Laura,Michael Landonas the stalwart Charles "Pa" Ingalls, Karen Grassle as the steadfast Caroline "Ma" Ingalls, and Melissa Sue Anderson as Laura's older sister Mary.
It's a fresh and more focused adaptation of the pathbreaking writer and teacher's books — which was perfectly suited for a Laura lifer like Sonnenshine. "I read them all like a million times. When my mom wanted to ground me, she would take away my books," she laughs. "We lived in kind of a rural place, so I found that the stories were very much like a part of my life. My mom and dad were very much like Ma and Pa. We raised sheep and chickens and ducks, my mom sewed all my clothes, and my dad was a hobbyist carpenter and mechanic. I've met people who felt like the books were very exotic because they lived in a city. But for me, they felt very much part of my life."
That's what Sonnenshine hopes for the newLittle House, which patches together some things old, some things new, and some things borrowed from all corners of theLittle House-verse for a watching experience that is as thrillingly original as it is comfortingly familiar. "The spirit of the [original] show is going to overlap. We're also using a little bit of the history of Laura Ingalls Wilder's real life, which the show did as well... and there are things we incorporated in the show that are from outside the books, that were part of her life, or a part of history at that time," Sonnenshine explains.
But if there's a single source that set the template for the newLittle House, it's the third book in Wilder's series, which gave the sprawling franchise its name. "The first season is inspired byLittle House on the Prairie, the book, which tells a very specific story of them moving to Kansas," Sonnenshine says. Crafting a new rendition of the classic story involved "taking all the iconic moments from the books [that] seemed to really leap off the page, and then finding a way to expand on some of those stories and some of those characters to create something that felt very much like modern television."
Modern indeed. Sonnenshine'sLittle House on the Prairiedutifully renders all the staple scenes from the book, many of which were depicted over the course of the series' 1974-1983 run on NBC as well, from the harrowing river forge, to the surreal malaria outbreak, to the fraught tensions between white settlers and the Osage community indigenous to the land.
Imperialism, racism, poverty, disease, and wartime trauma defined the Ingalls' time in Kansas. And the newLittle Housetreats it all with an unsparing directness that provides an enlivening contrast to the sentimental story of family love at its heart.
"I always describe the series and the books as a love story about a family. Maybe people see themselves in this family, or maybe they see a family that they want to be a part of," Sonnenshine says."They spend all their time together, they support each other, they love each other, they fight sometimes, but it's a really enduring and heartfelt story."
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Charles Ingalls moved his family from Wisconsin to Kansas in 1868, just three years after the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which ended the Civil War. The omnipresent and inescapable scars of that bloody battle abound throughout theLittle House on the Prairiebook, and plague just about every character on Sonnenshine's new series.
She describes the eight-episode first season as an "amazing opportunity to explore sort of the aftermath of a war. Instead of who wins and who loses, it just affected everyone." Luke Bracey's Pa is haunted by visions of his dead brother, who's often seen dressed in a moribund military uniform. Warren Christie's gruff outsider John Edwards, who becomes a close family friend, conceals a tremor earned from battle. And the Osage characters like Meegwun Fairbrother's Mitchell and Alyssa Wapanatâhk's White Sun are still waging skirmishes in the ongoing Indian Wars in the form of illegal land seizures and requisition proposals.
"We did a lot of research into what really happened with the Osage in Kansas," Sonnenshine explains. "So in the book, it's definitely there, but they're very much on the outside. It's kind of impenetrable to them. But what we did was dig into what the reality was on the prairie, what the situation was with the reservation, the Osage Diminished Reserve, and try to bring it to life in a way that felt like a human story." Sonnenshine said herLittle Houseteam did that by "creating some really great characters that are based on real people who lived there."
People like Dr. George A. Tann, a pioneering Black physician who appears in Laura's thirdLittle Housenovel and is portrayed in the new series by Jocko Sims. "Kansas was a very mixed state at that time, and it's very soon after the war, so there were a lot of different kinds of people living there," Sonnnenshine says, noting how the new series does not shy away from the reality that "people had prejudices. Of course we wanted to portray that there are people who have a problem, and there are people who don't... I really want to present a very humanist interpretation of the books."
Though this newLittle House on the Prairietakes a wide lens to turn-of-the-century life on the frontier, it's important who's doing the looking.
"So much of the show is about seeing it through a child's perspective, Laura's perspective. She's incredibly curious about the world and the people she meets, and she's incredibly empathetic," Sonnenshine says. "She is a very joyful person, who sees so much joy in everything that it's a little bit infectious. That's the kind of the thing that we lean into while exploring all these things. Empathy, curiosity, and joy through a child's eyes. I think it gives the show this sense of a real centeredness, and hopefulness."
The original series adaptation of Wilder's novels made a star of its Laura — Melissa Gilbert, who has been identified with the franchise ever since. Though casting any child role, let alone a successor to Gilbert, is "a tough thing," Sonnenshine says she "knew" she'd found her Laura "as soon as I saw her."
Joining Bracey as Pa, Crosby Fitzgerald as Ma, and Skywalker Hughes as Mary is Alice Halsey, whom Sonnenshine describes as "an incredible actress. She feels things very deeply, and she really just got this character who has this curiosity for the world."
The return ofLittle House on the Prairieruns on Halsey's curiosity as fuel, as her Laura upends conventions and builds much needed but needlessly taboo bridges with the Ingalls' neighbors in the town of Independence. And as Sonnenshine says, her curiosity proves infectious. "In some ways the show is a coming-of-age story for each character, even the adults, because they've kind of left everything they knew behind, and taken this leap into the great unknown."
Little House on the Prairiepremieres July 9 on Netflix.
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