Netflix knows, just like every other one of the biggest and best streaming services on the market, that it has to find ways to create franchises and series that people want to not just watch, but keep coming back to. After all, that's not only its stated mission, but also its best route to keeping its shareholders happy and paid-up. This means that picking up intellectual property with established fans is sort of its dream scenario, if it can do so affordably.
For obvious reasons, I don't have any insight into what Netflix paid for the rights to Little House on the Prairie, but given how beloved the novels are in the US, it wouldn't surprise me if it was quite a chunky deal. Now we're getting closer to the series actually arriving, and it just got another teaser underlining how charming it's likely to be when it does start streaming.
Telling the story of a family making the huge decision to move out into the great expanse of the prairie in Minnesota, the show promises to adapt at least the first novel in a series that eventually spanned dozens of books. That's why Netflix is likely so keen to drum up interest in the show – if it does well then it could run and run, like the original network TV adaptation did in the 1970s and 1980s.
This show will be much more high-budget, of course, since that seems to be the default for basically any streaming production. Still, its tone looks to be very similar, since it's based on the same source material. This means that while it might have some thoughtful moments ruminating on the truthfulness of the heroic American origin story, it's likely to be fairly saccharine overall.
In point of fact, this teaser shows us more of the local town that the family will come to know, and it looks like a surprisingly integrated one, given the time period being showcased. Whether that's a major part of the plot, or whether this is a slightly utopian version of the stories, we'll have to wait and see, but I'd assume it's more likely to be the former than the latter.
Still, Bridgerton has already shown how you can rewrite history into a sort of alternate world and still attract legions of fans, and Netflix will doubtless hope that Little House on the Prairie can imitate that sort of impact when it arrives on 9 July.
