Little House on the Prairie showrunner brags about show's anti-men agenda

Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie reboot is drawing attention after its showrunner said the series intentionally rejects traditional depictions of the American West, arguing that popular culture has overemphasized masculinity and gunfighting while overlooking the role women played.

"I think a lot of our pop culture portrays the West as men riding around with guns and solving problems with violence and posturing, but that is just not how it was settled," showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine told Deadline. "This is not how communities were formed. It was women, they were the backbone of the country, the formation of the country, and so I really wanted to explore that."

Sonnenshine said the creative team deliberately sought to avoid what she described as “tropes of sort of masculinity."

The reboot is based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved novel series which inspired the long-running NBC television series starring Michael Landon that aired from 1974 to 1983.

She added that the series deliberately avoids what she described as traditional masculine tropes.

"We really are trying to do a show that does not fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity, and we're leaning into how women shaped our lives, definitely through Caroline and through White Sun, who are both women who are in interesting marriages of equality," Sonnenshine said.

The new series is based directly on Laura Ingalls Wilder's books rather than serving as a remake of the beloved 1974 television series starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert. According to Sonnenshine, the books themselves contain relatively little violence, prompting the creative team to focus on family life, community and the experiences of women on the frontier instead. The eight-episode first season debuted on Netflix on July 9.