Little House on the Prairie: Laura had me at the hat

There's  been a short CiB hiatus while I attended an important family event, but now we are back in business with very important TV-watching


The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder are a phenomenon: always in print, beloved by generations of young people. Then came a legendary TV series in the 1970s and the 1980s: 10 years, hundreds of episodes, forever being re-discovered -  most recently during the pandemic, when they were massively popular.

So Netflix decided to make a new version: an 8-episode series which has just landed, with a further series already commissioned.

I watched all the new programmes, reread some of the books, and looked at some of the old versions, and wrote an article for the i paper with my valuable, weighty perceptions. There were all kinds of interesting aspects: the Native Americans gaining Main Character Energy, the un-tradwifing of Ma, Michael Landon's hair in the original... and the key question of Laura's hat. 

You can read it here:

 

Netflix's moralising updates to Little House on the Prairie just don't work

 

(as ever, I didn’t write the headline, and it doesn’t exactly reflect the content)

 

If you don’t subscribe, you may be able to reach it with this link

Little House on the Prairie


 

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