Nearly a century after the first book in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series was published, Netflix is revisiting the story of a pioneering family that struck out to make a new life for itself and headed west in the 1870s.
Season one of the reimagining, helmed by showrunner, executive producer and writer Rebecca Sonnenshine, arrives on Netflix on July 9.
Deadline was on the ground at the twelfth annual Bentonville Film Festival to moderate the inaugural Book to Screen panel Sunday, June 21, which featured Sonnenshine and actresses Crosby Fitzgerald who portrays Caroline “Ma” Ingalls and Alyssa Wapanatǎhk, who plays White Sun, an Osage woman and mother, in the series. The first episode of eight was screened ahead of the discussion.
The show, which is produced by CBS Studios and Anonymous Content, expands the popular and beloved narrative, mainly established by Wilder, whose semiautobiographical book series is told based on her memories and lived experience of homesteading with her family, first in Kansas, and later in Minnesota after they left their first home in Wisconsin. Sonnenshine made sure to emphasize the importance of women in the formation of what became America as Western lands became settled by families like the Ingalls.
“I think a lot of our pop culture portrays the West as men riding around with guns and solving problems with violence and posturing, but that is just not how it was settled. This is not how communities were formed. It was women, they were the backbone of the country, the formation of the country, and so I really wanted to explore that,” Sonnenshine said. “I think the books explore that really well. There’s very little violence in the books, and this is probably the most violence you’re going to see. We really are trying to do a show that does not fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity, and we’re leaning into how women shaped our lives, definitely through Caroline and through White Sun, who are both women who are in interesting marriages of equality.”
Motherhood provides both conflict and common ground for Caroline and White Sun, whose protective instincts are somewhat at odds when it comes to the fact that homesteaders claimed land that was originally home to Osage Native Americans.
“We’re almost like two mama bears circling each other at a distance, like ‘I have my cubs and you’ve got yours,’” Wapanatǎhk said. “’I see you, do see me?’”
Fitzgerald, who starred in Apple’s Palm Royale, agreed with Wapanatǎhk’s assessment, calling both characters “protective for very good reasons” and highlighting that they are united by “different types of loss”.
L-R: Wren Zhawenim Gotts as Good Eagle, Alice Halsey as Laura Ingalls in ‘Little House on the Prairie’
Eric Zachanowich/Netflix
The daughters of Caroline and White Sun further exemplify different ways to have been a young woman as American civilization developed. As can be found in the books, Laura Ingalls (played by Alice Halsey) and her older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) have very different ways of going about girlhood.
“[The mothers] both have these girls who are a little outside the norms of maybe what you would call lady-like. They have that tension with their daughters, but they also, I think, admire them for it, and then in terms of Laura and Mary, Mary is a good girl, and she wants to follow the rules, and maybe she doesn’t like being hot and sweaty, and she likes to sit and read. Laura wants to be in the dirt, and she wants to be using her slingshot and run around,” Sonnenshine said.
“We didn’t want to portray their relationship as always in conflict. They are sisters, one minute they love each other, the next minute they’re arguing, then they love each other again. We’re trying to portray all the sides of what was expected of ladies in the day, and we lean into how they defied those expectations. I know we all think we know exactly how women behaved, because we’ve seen it in a movie, but the truth is, everybody’s different, everybody has their own personalities and ways of living, even back in the olden times,” she added.
Inclusion of Osage characters and the perspective of Indigenous peoples who first resided in what became the United States of America, marks another key expansion of Sonnenshine’s storytelling.
“We thought, ‘Oh, if I created a family who could parallel the Ingalls and could get to know them, and through these characters get to know the Osage and what they were going through, then I felt like that was a reason to tell the story right now in 2026 because we have that opportunity, we have expanded our minds to think about [it],” she said. “So I tried to create complex characters, a complex marriage, complex parent child relationship, and then we found these amazing actors to sort of embody them.”
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The showrunner and Wapanatǎhk worked with production consultant Julie O’Keefe and story consultant Professor Robert Warrior to weave in Native American points of view. Wapanatǎhk, whose White Sun lives in log cabin with her husband William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) and their daughter Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), thanked Sonnenshine for “writing us in like people”.
“I feel like Laura would be proud that we’re given the space in the show. I hope we made her proud and did the Osage very well, portraying them, doing our best job, even though I’m not Osage. I’m Cree [First Nation and Nehiyaw] from territory in Canada,” Wapanatǎhk said. “Representing another nation is something that I take very seriously, and not lightly because they are a whole different nation. Each tribe has different culture, different language, we had to learn with an Osage language consultant. He also worked on Killers of the Flower Moon. Then we had Julie O’Keeffe doing the cultural consulting, and she was in my trailer every day, wrapping me with my blanket and putting the jewelry on me and making me feel so comfortable and taken care of. Consulting with them made me feel more ready every day, knowing that I was doing their tribe well. It’s a lovely day to be able to represent and feel acknowledged and respected, so I’m very proud of what we’ve done.”
Other diverse perspectives that receive expansion are those of Jocko Sims’ Dr. George Tann and Barrett Doss’ Emily Henderson. Tan appears in Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novel, and Sonnenshine did research to create Henderson, who shares initials with Eliza Harris, a woman the real life Dr. Tann married.
L-R: Jocko Sims as Dr. George Tann, Luke Bracey as Charles Ingalls, Maclean Fish as Adam Scott in ‘Little House on the Prairie’
Eric Zachanowich/Netflix
“We wanted to have this doctor, who was what Malcolm Gladwell would call a connector, [with] his foot in many worlds, he treated the Osage and the Cherokee and the white settlers and the Black settlers, and he was just sort of a person who moved between all these communities, which I found really interesting in that time period. I know that some people think that is something that didn’t happen, but it did, and he was very well respected,” Sonnenshine said. “We wanted to acknowledge the population of Black Americans who were living in Kansas at that time, and who had lived there for quite some time.”
During the panel, Sonnenshine teased some details about the second season – the show was renewed in March. She talked up the arrival of Nellie Oleson, who will be portrayed by Willa Dunn, a major antagonist from the books.
“We’re getting on a plane after this to go back to Winnipeg, where we shoot. This is widely known, that Nellie Oleson will make an appearance in season two. She’s been cast. I feel like that’s the thing that everybody’s been waiting for,” Sonnenshine said. “’Who’s playing Nellie? When is Nellie coming?’ Nellie is coming in season two, and she is a delight, and she is a nemesis, and we’re about to film a very famous scene from the book [On The Banks of Plum Creek] about candy.”
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