Netflix renewed its Little House on the Prairie remake before the first season had finished airing
Netflix is already doubling down on its Little House on the Prairie remake — and there could be even more to come.
Netflix has a bit of a reputation for swinging the axe far too quickly, so when they lock in a second season before the first has even aired, you know they reckon they’ve got a winner. Turns out, for once, they were right. Their new Western drama, Little House on the Prairie – yes, that Little House, back again – landed as a proper crowd-pleaser. Not too much schmaltz, plenty of grit, and it’s not even pretending to be a nostalgia exercise.
Little House on the Prairie launched in 2026 and hit over 6 million views in its first four days.
The brains behind this new version is Rebecca Sonnenshine (who you might recognise from The Housemaid). In its opening weekend, it raked in 6.4 million views, shooting straight to third on Netflix’s Top 10. A fortnight later, according to Nielsen, it was topping the charts across all the streamers. No faffing about — audiences properly showed up for this one.
The Pioneer Struggle
Despite the endless flow of TV Westerns over the past decade or so, Netflix hasn’t really cracked the formula up till now. They’ve pumped out a few cowboy efforts, but most of them just quietly faded away, never quite finding the snap or urgency that made the genre tick. Little House on the Prairie actually delivers – and yes, it remembers to be fun amid all the mud and misery.
The show follows Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and Charles Ingalls (Luke Bracey) as they drag their two daughters out from Wisconsin, aiming to stake a claim near Independence, Kansas. Predictably, nothing goes smoothly: their move west is a nightmare of lost dogs and capsized wagons, and when they finally make it, the promised land turns out to be Osage territory and not the blank slate they expected. One daughter befriends an Osage girl, helping to bridge cultures (and help the Ingalls out of several tight spots), all while tensions with the locals ramp up over who actually belongs on the land.
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If you’d been worried the whole thing would drown in misery, there’s actually a thread of hope running through it — the sort that only comes once you’ve accepted how rubbish things really are. Alice Halsey, as Laura Ingalls, is endlessly watchable — you buy her stubborn curiosity and sharpness. Credit also to Dan Romer for the score, and the costume department for resisting the urge to send everyone out in comic-book Western gear. This feels lived-in, not pantomime.
A Legacy to Match?
The original Little House on the Prairie ran for a whopping 9 seasons on NBC in the seventies and eighties, with 20-odd episodes per season and a trio of TV movies on top — it’s basically impossible for the Netflix series to match that sheer scale. That run even managed 16 Emmy nominations, so it was no hack job. The bar’s set properly high.
This new run might be lighter on episode count (eight for the first round), but it’s finding an audience. It’s currently rocking a 79% Rotten Tomatoes score and, more crucially, avoiding mere remake territory. Sonnenshine is clinging closer to the original Laura Ingalls Wilder books rather than the TV series, so the tone is a lot more survivalist. Gone is the neatly settled Walnut Grove from the ‘70s show — this one’s about scraping by at the edge of the known world, not moral lessons in a fictional Minnesotan hamlet.
And here’s a serious change: unlike the original, which mostly ignored Indigenous people and played straight into the white-frontier myth, the 2026 version has brought in Osage Nation consultants to get the cultural details right. The Ingalls’ presence as settlers in Osage territory is front and centre, not brushed aside, giving the show a chance to actually talk about displacement and strained alliances instead of hiding behind soft-focus prairie grass. Compared to the original, it’s far less about the "old-fashioned values" and more concerned with real-life messiness.
- Main cast:
- Crosby Fitzgerald as Caroline Ingalls
- Luke Bracey as Charles Ingalls
- Alice Halsey as Laura Ingalls