Rebecca Sonnenshine on Reimagining “Little House on the Prairie”: A New Adaptation Closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Novels than the Series

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page Send by Email

More than 40 years after the original television series which ran from 1974 – 1983, Little House on the Prairie is returning with a fresh adaptation created by Rebecca Sonnenshine. Inspired by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved semi-autobiographical novels, the series aims to capture the spirit, historical authenticity, and emotional intimacy of the original books while introducing the Ingalls family’s story to a new generation of viewers.

Rebecca Sonnenshine’s adaptation is anchored by Alice Halsey as Laura Ingalls, the spirited young heroine whose perspective drives the story. She is joined by Luke Bracey as Charles “Pa” Ingalls, Laura’s devoted, adventurous father whose optimism and determination help guide the family through the challenges of frontier life. Crosby Fitzgerald stars as Caroline “Ma” Ingalls, the resilient and resourceful matriarch whose strength holds the Ingalls family and teh community together, while Skywalker Hughes plays Mary Ingalls, Laura’s thoughtful and responsible older sister, whose close relationship with Laura is central to the family’s story.

In this interview, Sonnenshine discusses why the new series looks to Wilder’s novels as its primary source of inspiration that embraces the challenges, resilience, humor, and harsh frontier realities that defined the books, offering a version of Little House on the Prairie that remains faithful to Laura’s perspective while embracing contemporary storytelling.

Wilder’s literary legacy includes eight Little House novels chronicling Laura’s childhood, along with additional related works published later from her manuscripts, making the books one of America’s most enduring children’s literary series.

How does Little House speak to contemporary audiences? Where did you see an opportunity for a modern adaptation?

Rebecca Sonnenshine

It’s really about the books, which are honestly some of the most important literature that’s ever come out of America. They’re enduring and they were a huge success in their time. They were written in the 1930s, about a time that had happened 60 years earlier in the 1870s.

They were creating a conversation between those two time periods. Now 50 years after the original TV series, it was worth revisiting these novel from a female POV.

Little House on the Prairie is really a story about how America became America. It was not about men with guns riding around, exacting frontier justice.

It’s about families making their way west to a new world for a variety of reasons. I feel like this is a really good time to create a conversation between 2026 and the 1870s. Who are we now? Why are we the way we are?

Every time you adapt something, you create this new thing. That’s a point in time when these two places intersect. I think that’s really interesting and valuable to keep doing that as we progress, as we learn, as we go forward as a country.

Keep thinking about what does our past have to do with our future. What does our past have to do with our present? And all the while, this is a very charming book about a family and a young woman, Laura, who went on to become one of the most important authors that this country’s ever produced.

Sometimes she doesn’t get her due because she’s a female author for kids’ books. But they’re really amazing books. They’re really beautiful.

They’re very simple and very complex at the same time. I also think we have the opportunity now to explore things that maybe they didn’t have to explore in the time she was writing or when the first series was produced.

We have the opportunity to tell a bigger story about the indigenous people living on the land, the Black Americans living in Kansas and beyond at that time, the shadow of the Civil War, what it meant to be a pacifist, what it meant to fight, what it meant to dream. I think all those things are relevant today.

Every girl who reads these wants to be Laura Ingalls. I definitely related to her as a kid. I had a very similar relationship with my own father. I was a bit of a wild kid who liked to be dirty and go fishing and run around and was not particularly ladylike.

Describe the arrival of the Ingalls family in Independence, Kansas.

Everywhere they went was a starting over. When the Ingalls came to Kansas, they had spent their lives in a place where they were surrounded by a very large community that kind of intermarried.

Then they struck out and realized that this story they’d been told – you can do it on your own. You can be a self-made person. Your freedom and your individual strength can get you through. While that is something that books sell, it wasn’t true. That is the point of the show, which is you can’t do it alone. You have to reach out.

You have to make friends with people that maybe you wouldn’t think you’d be friends with. Maybe they aren’t exactly the kind of people that you thought you would hang out with? Maybe they don’t share everything with your personal values?

Yet it’s so important to reach out, to communicate, and to form communities that work together even if they don’t always see eye to eye. We must keep questioning each other, keep encouraging each other, keep challenging each other to look for a better way, a better life, and to keep redefining what is America. What do we want it to be? What can we make it?

Who should prosper?

Is it the government? Is it the railroads? Or us? I do think it’s this coming of age story about a family deciding who they want to be, what kind of life they want to live, and what kind of communities they want to form. And it’s about doing good works. It’s about learning to be open-minded. Our characters don’t always start open-minded. But in their meeting with new people, they change. And I think that’s so important.

I think the idea that you can change your mind, that you can change your opinion by opening up your perspectives is underrated. We don’t have to be stuck in the mode that we’re stuck in.

Alice Halsey plays Laura Ingalls in Little House On The Prairie

Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) Photo by Eric Zachanowich/ Netflix

Rebecca Sonnenshine On ‘The Boys’

How does your adaptation of Little House deviate from the novels?

I wanted to make some advancements on the role of the mother Caroline in the show, to highlight the role of women, which doesn’t occur in the books. Ma’s a little more of a follower. She’s a little more of a disciplinarian. Pa gets to be the fun one and the open-minded one in the novels.

I really wanted to take Caroline and give her a chance to change and give her a chance to be fun in her own ways, and have a relationship with her children that was equally special as the relationship that Pa’s had with them. And the other thing was the idea that sometimes they were driven by fear of the unknown, which made them have certain prejudices and biases.

I didn’t want to just say, ‘Well, that’s just the way they were.‘ I wanted them to be able to make changes.

There’s no point to me in just having Caroline Ingalls be afraid and not want to engage with the wider world and keep thinking about what is proper and good. I wanted her to have a real expansion of her mind. That’s what their journey is, which is expanding the possibilities of life and understanding of the world.

Julian Fellowes On ‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ and ‘The Gilded Age’

Mary, Charles and Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie

Mary Ingalls (Skywalker Hughes) Luke Bracey (Luke Bracey) as Charles Ingalls & Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) Photo by Eric Zachanowich/ Netflix

What are the main themes you want to explore?

I think that resilience is a real theme in all of these books. The idea that you can get through anything is the North Star of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s writing. She did go through very hard times.

Yet the spirit of the books is that they made the best of times. They leaned into what they had instead of what they did not have. You could create magic out of what you had around you.

While that is an idealized look at the world, it’s also something that you can hold on to in terms of there’s always something good in the world. There’s always a chance to start over.

This is a love story about a family. The family is so important. They spend all their time together. They love each other. They fight with each other. They entertain each other. They sing together. They play together. They tell stories together.

Family is a way to be present in your life and a way to find the hope and the beauty, even though life can be dangerous and there are disasters waiting for you around every corner. I think we can all relate to that to some degree.

How did your writers’ room work pulling special moments from the book?

We definitely knew where it started and where it ended. Those were two points that you want to go between. There is something of a story in this book, although it is also very episodic in the sense that it’s kind of full of wonderful details.

Maybe the plot itself isn’t a driving the story, but we wanted to create something that was serialized that went through the entire season, which is this idea about, whose land is this? Who has the right to settle here? Will it be changing? That was something that ran underneath every episode.

Our “blue skying” was very much about the writers making a list on whiteboards about all the iconic moments in this book that we didn’t want to leave out – from very small things to like Ma’s rocking chair, to a river crossing, to a prairie fire, to the idea of horse thieves. All these things that were floating around that maybe didn’t totally have a story.

We wrote them all on the board. Then we created an event for every episode so that we could keep the story going. So when the Osage go to the Ingalls house, we wanted that very iconic chapter from the book to be part of the story.

How do you like incite a story like this? What kind of event do you give it? One thing in our research that we came up with is the post office. It was the way that the West came to be because it allowed people to send and receive money from back home. It allowed them to send information, news and entertainment.

It created this network of keeping people in touch. So we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have that be both a wonderful thing and the thing that signals that the settlers are never going to go away?’ The post office also being something that brought the town together. And so, coming up with moments like that so that every episode has these little touchstones to hang all this story off of. That was the way we started to structure things while keeping all those threads alive about the land and the personal stories that we’re telling about people trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be.

What would you say to Laura Ingalls Wilder if she were still alive?

I think that she had a very strong sense of curiosity about the world and people.

If I had to ask her anything, I would ask her, ‘What do you make of your childhood? What are the lessons you took out?’ Because I think that she was writing very much through rose-colored glasses. She admitted, ‘I’m writing something that I want to give people hope and I want to see the good in everything.’

I feel she was a very complex thinker and I really would have loved to know what she thought about progress, women starting to get the vote and what does she make of the future?