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SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the “Little House on the Prairie” reboot through Episode 2, now streaming on Netflix.
Few things are as scary to OG “Little House on the Prairie” viewers as Laura Ingalls’
childhood bully, Nellie Oleson, on a bad day. But Netflix’s updated take on the beloved story takes things to a very meta level with a spooky scene that pays tribute to that iconic pop culture nemesis.
In Episode 2 of Netflix’s new “Little House on the Prairie” remake, young Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) and her big sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) have become lost in the wild near their new home on the prairie in 1870s Independence, Kansas. While “Ma” Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and “Pa” Charles (Luke Bracey) scramble to find them, the girls happen upon a trio of nefarious looking people in the woods — including Ida, played by Alison Arngrim, the actress best known for her role as Nellie Oleson on NBC’s “Little House on the Prairie.”
While every version of “Little House” is a story of survival, the Netflix show sticks to its family-friendly roots, with the scariest part of the scene being a dirty and disheveled Ida (Arngrim) attempting to hold the girls hostage until John Edwards (Warren Christie) quickly arrives to save the day. Still, it’s a whole different side of Arngrim than audiences have seen before.
“I always had this idea that I wanted Alison Arngrim to be in the show,” “Little House on the Prairie” showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine tells Variety. “So when I was writing Episode 2, I was telling a couple of my friends, ‘I want to get Alison Arngrim to play this lady, do you think she’d do it?’ And they were like, ‘maybe!’ And then all this time later, when I actually got to make it, she said yes. I read her autobiography, and it’s so good. She’s so smart and cool and interesting and funny. And she did it; she came to the show and it was so exciting. She was such a good sport. She was like, ‘Can I have more stuff on my teeth?’ Sure! Go for it!”
Once Sonnenshine secured Arngirm’s cameo, she had a hard time keeping it quiet — mostly because she forgot she had already told people about her dream casting.
“Then one of my friends is like, ‘Did you get Nellie?’ And I’m like, ‘It was a big secret! Wait, who told you?’ And they’re like, ‘You did!'” Sonnenshine says. “Oh, right, I wanted to do this a long time. That’s right, I forgot that two years ago, I’m like, ‘I want Nellie in my show, I wonder if she’d do it?'”
The fun inclusion of Arngrim as a villain is just one way the new “Little House” pays homage to the original “Little House,” which ran for nine seasons on NBC from 1974-1983. Sonnenshine has also met with multiple other members of the original cast, including Melissa Gilbert (who played Laura), and both shows are produced by the Friendly family through Friendly Family Productions.
“[Executive producer] Trip Friendly is very involved with the cast from the original show and events, and I did get a chance to meet a lot of them,” Sonnenshine says. “I went to an event called ‘LauraPalooza,’ and I got to meet Dean Butler (Almanzo Wilder) and Charlotte Stewart, who played Eva Beadle Simms, who was so fascinating. And one of the actresses that had played Grace (a role shared by Brenda Turnbaugh and Wendi Turnbaugh, now Wendi Lou Lee). So I did get to meet some of those people, and they were so nice and so excited. They’re like, ‘We’re telling everybody to watch it!'”
But Sonnenshine, who calls Gilbert “the sweetest, loveliest person in the world” and “an icon,” is quick to remind that is not her Laura and “we don’t own the original series.”
“We don’t license it. We don’t have anything to do with it,” Sonnenshine says. “But we will overlap, obviously, even with stuff that wasn’t in the books, because we’re drawing from real life, just like they did.”
“Little House” has already been renewed for a second season at Netflix and is currently underway on its Season 2 episodes, which will feature the introduction of Willa Dunn as the new Nellie Oleson. But because Sonnenshine is first and foremost a fan of Wilder’s “Little House” book series that started it all, she’s relying more on the text and less on referencing Arngrim’s performance.
“I watched some of it as a kid, but I didn’t have cable as a kid, so I didn’t get to watch it all the time,” Sonnenshine says. “I had to see if the antenna would get it. And then I didn’t get to see it in reruns because I didn’t have cable, so I didn’t really look at too much of the old series. I think I went back and looked at the pilot just to see what they did, but in general it’s just from the books.”
