Melissa Gilbert broke her silence on the historical accuracy debate swirling around Netflix’s new LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE.
“The short answer is no, neither are entirely accurate to the times nor the books,” Gilbert wrote in a July 17 Substack post, weighing in on both the streaming adaptation and the NBC series that made her a household name from 1974 to 1983.
Gilbert, 62, played Laura Ingalls Wilder in the original series alongside Michael Landon’s Charles and Karen Grassle’s Caroline. Netflix’s version, which premiered July 9, hews closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s semi-autobiographical novels, following the Ingalls family’s move to a homestead near Independence, Kansas. The streamer renewed the show for a second season back in March, months before it had even aired.
Gilbert avoided commenting until now, she explained, both because she felt too close to the material to weigh in without emotion and because she didn’t think it was her place to grade anyone else’s adaptation.
“I do want to speak to an issue I am seeing run rampant on social media and in articles,” she wrote. “That is whether or not the new LITTLE HOUSE and the original version are historically accurate.”
Gilbert ticked off the discrepancies herself. Laura Ingalls Wilder, she pointed out, didn’t spend real time in Independence, Kansas until she was 60 and traveling with her daughter Rose, and the actual Ingalls family stayed in Walnut Grove, Minnesota only briefly — nowhere near the years suggested onscreen.
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The list runs long. Mary Ingalls never married, Carrie Ingalls was born in August rather than on Christmas Day and characters like Albert, James, Cassandra and Jenny Wilder never existed at all. Charles Ingalls’ brother never fought or died in the Civil War, and Nellie Oleson never married a Jewish man or had twins.
“My hope is that folks realize that these are all perfect examples of dramatic license,” Gilbert wrote, noting that even Laura Ingalls Wilder aged up all three Ingalls girls when she sat down to write the books.
“So rather than getting all twisted up in what’s real and what’s dramatized, maybe just sit back and go for the ride the creative minds behind these shows want to take you on,” she wrote. “If you like it, stick with it. If you don’t, you don’t have to watch.”
For readers craving the unvarnished history, Gilbert recommended LAURA INGALLS WILDER: FROM THE PRAIRIE TO THE PAGE, a PBS documentary directed by Emmy winner Mary Murphy and produced by Michael Kantor. She called it the definitive account, streaming now on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
Gilbert closed her post by pointing back to what she considers the real throughline of the Little House stories: kindness, patience and loving God and neighbor, no matter which version tells them.
Dean Butler, who joined the original series in Season 6 as Almanzo Wilder — Laura’s eventual husband — recently offered his own take on the Netflix reboot.
“Something that I love about the program that I think would have been really fun in the original — which we did not do — is the family singing,” Butler said in a video posted to Instagram, pointing to songs Pa plays on his fiddle that the family sings along to.
Whether audiences side with the reboot or the original, Gilbert’s real argument is a simple one: these are stories drawn from a real life, not a history textbook. The virtues Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about have carried her books and both television adaptations for well over a century, long after anyone remembers which sister was born when.
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