Laura's baaaaaaaaaack
Clutch your corsets and tin cups, y’all, Netflix is rebooting Little House on the Prairie.
If you write a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder, when Netflix announces its Little House on the Prairie reboot, everyone you ever knew will message and text, as if they just saw a segment on the Today show about how your husband got pregnant
Did you know about this?
As a hardcore book stan, I didn’t connect with the show as a kid—too much wailing and hand wringing, not enough attention paid to the storylines of the Books. But at Laura events, no one will like you if all you do is whine about inauthenticity like some hipster record store dude from the 90s.
Hey, if the show brings you joy, go for it. I’ve come to accept that my hair stylist will never be impressed that I published a book, but lights up every 6-8 weeks when I tell her I met Dean Butler once, aka TV’s Almanzo Wilder.
Resistance to the show turned to acceptance one evening about ten years ago, as I watched Jane the Virgin, which lovingly riffs on telenovelas.
I know!
The key to embracing LHOP the show was to watch it as a melodrama. Embrace the camp. Stop ranting to my hair stylist about how Pa doesn’t have a beard and Jack isn’t even a bulldog—lean into the Nellie/Laura mudwrestling scenes.
As RuPaul says, “We’re born naked and the rest is drag,” and props to Alison Arngram who I credit as one of the top drag performers of our time.
In a way, you have to admire the fearlessness with which LHOP runs off the rails late seasons, like the time Albert the morphine addict burns down the school for the blind and kills Mary’s baby.
I know!
God bless the 70s. But what will Netflix producers do with LHOP today?
We live in a post-nostalgia LHOP lens. Modern readers accept that The Books present a colonialist view of Western expansion and that minstrel shows are not okay, even if Wilder wrote Pa as an ignorant racist versus an intentional one.
My Big Theory is that we’re ready for Laura again because we are tired of sorting complicated characters into buckets labeled “good” or “bad.” We are ready for the Era of Complication, in which we understand people and art contain multitudes.
If Beyoncé can become one of iconic, feminist artists of our time by writing songs about her compulsively adulterous husband, then perhaps The Books can be colonialist AND an incredible coming-of-age story featuring one of the most compelling heroines of American literature, who Wilder biographer Caroline Fraser describes as a “Trojan horse for complex and ambiguous reactions to manifest destiny, wilderness, self-reliance, and changing views of women outside the home…”
[Conveniently, I reached page 5 in my slowest read of Prairie Fires ever this morning.]
Far-right rabble-rouser Megyn Kelly is already griping about “wokism,” (a term I loathe). But guess what television show beloved by Ronald Reagan already featured Black characters on the prairie?
Wanna get woke? Watch this clip featuring Todd Bridges of Different Strokes fame that went viral a few years back. WHOA.
The 70s were a weird, wild time.
But what do writers and producers do in the 2020s? How does one tell the story written from a colonialist worldview almost a century old, then remade as a 70s telenovela? The glaring omission in the show wasn’t lack of Black characters, but Indigenous erasure. (At least, so far as I remember. You VHS box set owners can correct me if I’m wrong).
Will this series be a grittier version? Or a nambier-pambier version?
I can only pray the writers don’t try to fix racism by having one recurring biracial family who lives ten claims over. Or one Indigenous character who stops by the store every third episode for tobacco and a game of Checkers with Pa.
I’m hiding under my nine-patch quilt. What will these Hollywood types do?!?!
Dear Netflix,
I have a few requests:
Could we bring in Indigenous advising? Thank you. And maybe film on an actual prairie so Carrie can stop face-planting? I’ve always thought The Long Winter would make for an amazing limited series. For that, if you don’t bring in Barb Mayes Boustead for consulting, we the Laura community will be very, very disappointed.
And finally, cast Pedro Pascal as Pa, so he can rock that shirt off, suspenders only look. Megyn will get over one Chilean and certain nods to the classic show MUST BE HONORED.
