Starring: Luke Bracey, Crosby Fitzgerald, Alice Halsey, Skywalker Hughes, Jocko Sims, Meegwun Fairbrother

Director: Various
Released: 2026

Mood: If you need to introduce a child to Westerns and want to be a good aunt or uncle who fast-forwards through the minimal inappropriate stuff and leaves them with a desire to do wholesome offline things like collecting rocks and giving speeches.

The first season of Little House on the Prairie 2026 is visually stunning, but it’s not good TV. Or maybe I’m just the wrong audience.

• I don’t like melodramatic child acting
• I don’t like stories that make all the white people heroes (especially when it’s rooted in actual events)
• I don’t like reboots that claim to take a new approach but add nothing of value

Most people seem to dig the reboot. It has a score of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. I just don’t get WHY. It feels like a Hallmark Western. Sure, the books were Laura’s version of events that intentionally sanitized frontier life for a young audience, they made her family sound practically perfect, and they contained a high ratio of scenes that were creative inventions – the books are fiction, after all.

But this version was supposed to balance all of that by showing the Osage perspective, and a more accurate portrayal of tensions and events of that time.

I haven’t re-read the Little House books as an adult, although I’ve been occasionally tempted because I loved them as a kid. I also haven’t rewatched the show BUT I did recently watch a bunch of clips, because I wanted to know if the 1974 series would annoy me as much as the 2026 series.

It did not. Now let’s get all the way into it.

Little House on the Prairie season one (2026) is based on the third book in the series with the same title. The Ingalls family has uprooted their life in the big woods of Wisconsin to seek out land in Kansas.

We start with the tail end of their journey by wagon, facing a few minor hiccups like their beloved dog being swept away in a river which had me bawling and expecting the same level of emotional connection for the rest of the season. The family gets to Independence in the first episode and it’s only the beginnings of a town – no school, no post office. But hey, the land is up for grabs!

Except it’s not. It turns out that the advertised free land is owned by the Osage Nation. Believing that the Osage will just move on and give it to them, Pa (Luke Bracey) confidently starts building his family home with the help of a gruff neighbour, Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie).

Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald) finds out she’s pregnant. The family starts having small dramas that play out by the end of each episode. Meanwhile local Osage leader William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) befriends Pa and his daughter, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), becomes Laura’s BFF.

A suspiciously small minority of Osage people don’t want the settlers there. A lot of time focuses on Mary’s (Skywalker Hughes) struggles to fit in while crushing on a local orphan, the women’s society rejecting successful Black business owner Emily (Barrett Doss), and Laura (Alice Halsey) getting into a variety of scrapes.

But then there’s a fever and a mass horse theft and a fire and the Osage chiefs reject the offer to buy their land. Almost all of this happens in the last two episodes, and while it’s dramatic for 20+ minutes at a time, it’s still mostly resolved in a comforting way. It’s like the narrator says in George of the Jungle – “Nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos.”

On the positive side, there are some really strong performances in the new Little House on the Prairie.

• Crosby Fitzgerald as Ma strikes the right balance of uptight, frustrated, and capable
• Like in the original series, Skywalker Hughes as Mary steals the show with a significantly deeper and more interesting character than Laura
• Jocko Sims gives a layered performance as Dr. Tann
• Mary Holland is hilariously obnoxious and self-serving as Jemma James
• Wren Zhawenim Gotts gives the deepest, most soulful child performance as Good Eagle
• Warren Christie as Mr. Edwards shows literally every emotion, and does it well

But the protagonist and narrator is Luke Bracey as Pa Ingalls, with a strong focus on Alice Halsey as Laura, and they’re both just not it.

Bracey is missing Charles Ingalls’ massive Abraham Lincoln beard. To be fair, Michael Landon didn’t have it either, I’m just a stickler when the real person had impressive facial hair.

Bracey’s performance isn’t bad, it just often feels more like he’s in a modern Western rom-com – and that’s partly the writing. It’s also his ever-present chest hair peeking out of his casually open shirt. Highly improper for a pious Protestant man!

When it comes to Halsey as Laura, I don’t want to just hate on a child actor—they’re kids. I know I’ve dumped on some from ‘50s Westerns (hello, Shane), but those folks are now either grown-ass adults or dead, so they don’t care what reviewers think. I’m trying to be better about how I talk about the ones who are kids right now.

Halsey feels like she’s giving a PERFORMANCE in all of her scenes – like it’s for a theatre audience, not like she’s actually there. Compared to Skywalker Hughes, who evokes a teen with complex emotions and personality traits that you’d expect from that era, Laura is just a 2D character who keeps randomly demonstrating talents that win over everyone around her.

My other major beef with the characters in Little House 2026 is entirely to do with the writing, not the actors. Other than Ma’s initial fear of the Osage people, the Ingalls family are always shown as standing in vocal opposition to anyone who mistreats people of different races, while swooping in and saving everyone around them.

Pa is the saviour of an alcoholic and of the town during the fire. Ma snubs the women’s society over not letting Emily Henderson attend a meeting. Pa and Laura are immediately friendly towards the Osage. Laura heroically tries to get help for the Osage family during the fever. It’s even more fictional than the books.

Why not just write an entirely new story with fresh characters, and not try to claim that this is a more historically accurate version of Little House?

I would watch other shows produced or written by Rebecca Sonnenshine. The quality of the production here is top-notch. The lighting alone deserves serious praise. I would also watch other shows or movies with most of these actors. But I definitely won’t be watching the second season of Little House on the Prairie.

I just like my Westerns to be unapologetically campy or realistically dramatic or darkly gritty – they need to pick a lane and own it. Little House is trying to add bits of drama and grit while preserving the feeling of a child’s optimistic story about her wonderful family and how everything will always work out, and that just doesn’t work.

But what do I know? Y’all seem to like it. Maybe I’m just way too jaded for stories about good people. You tell me.