By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1974 pilot telemovie for the long-running and much-loved TV series Little House On The Prairie, starring Michael Landon, Karen Grassle, Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson.
After engaging so wholeheartedly with Netflix’s new series adaptation of the Little House On The Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the next logical stop is an immediate revisit of the classic 1970s-1980s TV series that first made the books truly famous on a grand scale. For anyone that grew up watching this big, wholesome, family-friendly slab of pure Americana, the mere mention of a contemporary remake was enough to send shivers of concern racing up the spine. And while Netflix’s new version of Little House On The Prairie is certainly more “modern” in its outlook (especially with regards to Native-American and African-American peoples), it remains essentially faithful to the source material, while also evoking the same warmth and depth of emotion that the 1970s-1980s TV series did. In short, like the original series, it’s just great family television.
A ratings winner and pop cultural icon, the original Little House On The Prairie ran for a staggering nine seasons, from 1974 through to 1983, with three subsequent telemovies wrapping up the long-running narrative in 1984. It all began, however, with an initial telemovie pilot, which first aired on major US network NBC on March 30, 1974. Former network vice-president and TV producer Ed Friendly had purchased the rights to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier novels, and brought them to actor/producer/director Michael Landon, who was on a development contract at NBC, for whom he’d featured in the popular western series Bonanza.
“I came home and found my twelve-year-old daughter devouring the Laura Ingalls Wilder books,” Michael Landon said of his introduction to the material. “Then I discovered that my wife had devoured them too when she was a girl, and she was reading them again. So, I went to NBC and told them that Little House On The Prairie was it.” Though NBC wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the simple, straightforward nature of the popular books, they parked their concerns principally because they had faith in Landon and Friendly, and agreed to finance a pilot telemovie to gauge audience interest. The pilot was a ratings success, and the rest, as they say, was history.
Terse and insular in tone, the Little House On The Prairie pilot follows the Ingalls family – warm but headstrong Charles (Michael Landon), his adventurous but slightly nervous wife Caroline (Karen Grassle), and their three daughters, Mary (Melissa Sue Anderson), Laura (Melissa Gilbert) and Carrie (Lindsay & Sidney Greenbush) – as they leave their home in The Big Woods of Wisconsin and head west in search of a better, more expansive life. The family eventually settles on the prairie near the town of Independence, Kansas. It’s a tough life, as Charles builds a house with the help of neighbour Mr. Edwards (Victor French), and then deals with raging wildfires, bitter cold and snow, a scarcity of food, and the unsettling presence of the local Osage tribe.
Little House On The Prairie is told very much from the perspective of feisty tween Laura, and as such, works inventively within a limited scope. While Charles Ingalls leaves the homestead to hunt for game, fetch supplies from Independence, source timber from the woods, and work briefly as a cowboy to earn money, Caroline and their daughters stay on the prairie, and so too does the audience. This truly immerses the viewer in the tough life of the pioneer, with its constant hard work and threats from outside, but simple pleasures too. The rhythms of the pilot are languid and modest, with occasional jolts of excitement, with a wolf pack attack one particular highlight. Michael Landon directs with sensitivity and no-nonsense austerity, while the sentiment-rich script by Blanche Hanalis (who would become a major player in the development of the subsequent series) maintains Ingalls’ heartland simplicity.
Considerably grittier than the long-running series, the characters are also a little harsher in the pilot. While they would eventually become borderline saintly, Charles and Caroline are far more flawed here. Charles is prone to selfishness and stubbornness, while Caroline is priggish and conservative. Her attitudes toward Native-Americans are shocking, but let’s cut Caroline some slack here: the press around Native-Americans was unfair and far from good at the time, and she’s a woman often left alone on the prairie with her young daughters.
Fear and ignorance can often breed disdain, and though Caroline’s quiet bigotry is certainly a concern, the pilot’s general depiction of Native-Americans is a largely positive and thoughtful one…though, per the era, the pilot’s principal Native American – the courteous, French-speaking Osage Chief Soldat Du Chene – is played by a Puerto Rican actor, in the charismatic personage of Victor Mohica.
The performances in the pilot are uniformly superb. Landon is wonderfully stoic, with hints of quiet desperation, and Grassle matches him in grit and determination. A young Melissa Gilbert (who would literally grow up before our very eyes as the series continued) hints at the sass and feistiness that would eventually make her one of the most endearing characters in TV history, while Victor French (who would later co-star with Landon on the popular series Highway To Heaven) is a big, bullocking delight as the uncouth (he teaches Laura how to spit) but big-hearted Mr. Edwards.
While the long-running Little House On The Prairie series would involve many more characters (as anyone who watched it knows, the Ingalls family do not stay in Kansas, but settle instead on the banks of Plum Creek near the town of Walnut Grove in Minnesota) and a far greater sense of drama and more complex plotting, there is much joy to be derived from the quiet simplicity of the pilot telemovie. It boasts abundant charm and authenticity, and will make for a fascinating watch for those whose first encounter with the loveable Ingalls family has come via the gorgeous new Netflix series.
Availability: The Little House On The Prairie pilot telemovie is included with the Little House On The Prairie: The Complete Series DVD box set.
