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On July 9, “The Boys” writer and “Archive 81” creator Rebecca Sonnenshine fulfills a dream she’s had since she was 10 years old, with the debut of her “Little House on the Prairie” adaptation on Netflix.
A lifelong Laura
Ingalls Wilder fan, Sonnenshine — who recently had success with the word-of-mouth blockbuster “The Housemaid” — pitched the streamer and show producers hard when she found out a “Little House” reboot was in the works. She landed the job not in spite of her work on supernatural, horror and genre series like “The Vampire Diaries,” but because of it.
“I think they were a little skeptical, but also had been thinking, ‘Oh, maybe we should look for a genre writer to give this some shape,'” Sonnenshine tells Variety. “And at the end of the meeting, the producers are like, ‘Wow, you know a lot about “Little House on the Prairie!”‘ Yes, I do, I know a lot about it. I didn’t even have to reread the books. That’s how much they’re in my brain. I can just talk about them.”
Sonnenshine, who previously worked with Netflix on her now-canceled drama “Archive 81,” sold them on her idea, which was a much larger scale version of the story than was told in the beloved NBC classic starring Melissa Gilbert.
“I was really pursuing it — these are the first books I ever read,” Sonnenshine says. “This is my origin story. Guys always talk about, ‘My origin story is Superman, I read the comics,’ all that stuff. And so my origin story is ‘Little House on the Prairie’ — and that’s how I got to be writing ‘Archive 81.’ [‘Little House’] just really shaped me. The books are so cinematic that they really gave me this brain as a kid of seeing things in pictures, and I think it really led me into being a filmmaker in general.”
While Sonnenshine’s “Little House” still centers on the story of a young Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) as she and her family — father Charles (Luke Bracey), mother Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) — move from their home in Wisconsin to build a new life in Kansas, it focuses much more on the Indigenous people connected to the larger narrative featured in Wilder’s actual “Little House” book series, the Osage. In particular, it introduces the mixed-race Osage family, the Mitchells: husband and wife William (Meegwun Fairbrother) and White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk) and their daughter Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts).
“As an adult, everything is different. Especially ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ it’s all about the Osage,” Sonnenshine says. “The Osage are all over that book, but we don’t know them at all. And I thought, well, we have to know them. I have to figure out a way that we can know them, and how do you do that? Trying to create a family that parallels the Ingalls. I had to do a lot of research to figure out how to do that, and I did and we worked with a story consultant named Robert Warrior.”
Despite support from Netflix — the streamer has already ordered a second season of the show, which is now in production — when news of the “Little House” reboot was made public in January 2025, Sonnenshine was faced with her first wave of criticism, led by Megyn Kelly.
“Netflix, if you woke-ify ‘Little House on the Prairie’ I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project,” Kelly posted on X while sharing the news of the Netflix reboot.
Melissa Gilbert, who starred on the original “Little House” for nine seasons and 204 episodes between 1974 and 1982, came to the rescue on Threads with a response: “Ummm…watch the original again. TV doesn’t get too much more ‘woke’ than we did. We tackled: racism, addiction, nativism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, spousal abuse and every other ‘woke ‘ topic you can think of. Thank you very much.”
But on the eve of the “Little House” reboot premiere come renewed questions about what changes could be made to the series, which will focus much more heavily on the story of the Indigenous people who lives are affected by the arrival of the Ingalls and the other pioneers moving into their territory in the late 1800s in Independence, Kansas.
“I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest,” Sonnenshine says. “I know what I think it means, which is the definition of it being aware and alert to social injustice and prejudice, in particular racial prejudice. So, when people say, ‘I hope it’s not woke,’ I think, ‘Really? Oh, that’s interesting.’ But I don’t think people are using it in that manner; I think it’s just become a catch-all word for things that I don’t quite understand. If I had to sum it up, what people are afraid of is that something from their childhood will be portrayed in a way that scares them.”
Sonnenshine is sticking with what she’s “been saying from the beginning,” which is “I feel like people are worried for no reason.”
“I don’t feel like there’s anything that people are not going to like,” she says. “We’re exploring some interesting issues, but I think that they would be interested in those, too. I think conservative people are really interested in Native American stories, honestly. When people watch the show, it’s like, ‘We want to know more about the Mitchells,’ and that’s kind of across the board. I think that they’ll really like it. I think people just are afraid of whatever they’re afraid of, and that’s OK. But I honestly think that there’s nothing to be afraid of and it’s a story that will really resonate with everybody.”
It’s not lost on Sonnenshine that one of the ways audiences could connect with the show is through the wholesome, cozy, cottage-core, DIY vibes that are present throughout the “Little House” reboot, and have become increasingly trendy in recent years. On the one hand, there’s the very dark reality of what life and death looks like in a tale of survival on the prairie — and on the other, there’s the Ingalls enjoying a pretty adorable homemade Christmas.
Sonneshine hopes that audiences can embrace the balance of that “Little House” aesthetic without veering into tradwife discourse.
“It’s fascinating to me. I am super crafty, like I come from a crafty family, and so for me, obviously, I’m a non-tradwife,” Sonnenshine says. “I come from a family of doers, and I learned from my dad. He was a carpenter, he was a mechanic, he made solar panel prototypes, he invented computer programs. He was a gardener. He raised sheep and chickens, and he just liked to do things. And my mom was the same way. She sewed my clothes. She was a great cook. She would call it ‘putting up’ the vegetables. You’re pickling vegetables, you’re making jam, you’re doing all these things that I don’t feel like should be like cornered by tradwives. I like to do all those things. I’m a great knitter, I’m a great embroiderer.”
The self-proclaimed “not a tradwife” but bigtime baker and sewer says working with your hands like the Ingalls “doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing” in the digital age.
“Anybody can pick up a book and learn how to bake something, or draw something, or plant a garden. Those things are not the exclusive landscape of tradwives or influencers, or any of those things,” Sonnenshine says. “I think what I want for people to just think about is, what little things would interest me that I could do with my hands and incorporate into everyday life?”
