8. Little Landon on the Prairie

Let's go back to my family room floor in the suburbs of southern Ontario. It's a weekday in the mid eighties, four twenty six pm. My sister and I have just returned home from school. The first half hour of Oprah is coming to a close. It's time to switch the channel. This wasn't a choice. It just was mon Pa pulling up in a wagon, Ma primly tucking a wayward strand of hair and her bonnet, Pau's infectious laugh, and the girls Laura, Mary and little Carrie joyfully running down a

There was a lot of things on TV actually in the nineteen.

Seventies that were really huge.

Aren't you in reruns or out on DVD and people are not watching it?

But Little House in the Prairie is what in the heck?

Little House went into reruns while it was still on in prime time. The show ended in nineteen eighty three, but it's never actually gone off the air, So you can add millions and millions of viewers to those original numbers we just told you about.

The show stayed on the air for fifty years and is actually better known now than it was when it was originally on NBC.

We're talking a half century of television. It's on Hallmark, it's on VHS, it's on DVD, It's on Amazon Prime, it's on Peacock, and an entire new generation of kids discovered it. During COVID there was a.

Little House in the Prairie, the videos on the phone that you watched on the way here, Yeah, a little bit.

In March of twenty twenty two, we saw the number of Google searches for a Little House on the Prairie double from the month before.

Some of you might have it on another screen right this second.

I literally wake up in the middle of the bit and go, somebody somewhere is watching Loves the Worry right now. It's literally because it's in every country on Earth.

It's been dubbed into every language.

There's beds in every language.

It's bananas.

There's a lot of reasons Little House never quits, but without question, one of the biggest is Michael Landon, the show's producer, writer, director, and most importantly, the star, better known to many as Charles Ingalls Laura's paw.

Sorry about what I guess.

I just couldn't find the words to say.

It was in my heart, for better or worse. Michael Landon made the show all his own.

This is a magnetic individual.

He glowed you know.

He just he had it.

In the books, Paw was charming and steadfast, and Laura was the star. And the television show, Michael Landon had lovely hair and was always crying. He had a well oiled bear chest, and as I got a bit older, I enjoyed how nice he looked in tight pants and suspenders. He was the star. Laura is our adoring proxy. If you're a person devoted to Little House book series, the

He said, you know, everyone's going to be watching these shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing, and every win he said it to it, yeah right, oh by it, And Blake didn't believe him.

And here we all are.

We didn't get it. Michael got the My motivation to create these two versions of Little House was essentially the same. If the books were the result of Laura wanting to memorialize her father's stories. The television show is in many ways the result of Michael Landon using Laura's writing to tap into his own traumatic childhood. Still, at the end of the day, Michael Lannon made Laura's prairie all his own, and we all liked it there, even if it was

There were a number of radio adaptations, both small scale and also hallmarked in adapting The Little House Books.

That's Bill Anderson again. He's been researching and writing about Laura since he was a kid, and has written many books on her life.

But Laura Ingleswilder was very, very skeptical and wanted approval of the scripts, and she wasn't altogether happy with the radio versions. Rose Wilder Lane felt the same way when her books Let the Hurricane Law and Freeland were adapted to radio. So I don't think they were fans of media.

After Laura's death, Rose continued to spurn offers. But when Rose died in nineteen sixty eight, things changed pretty quickly. Enter Roger Lee McBride. You remember McBride. He's a complicated figure who had a unique relationship with Rose. He referred to himself as her adopted grandson and even called her grandma. Having no children, Rose designated him or heir, and after her death he acquired all the rights to Little House

Naturally circa nineteen seventy one. My sister's at home ill with a cold from school. She's a teenager, and my father goes in and to say goodbye to her in the morning and discovers her reading one of the Little House Books. And he can't understand why his teenage daughter's rereading a children's book that her mother had read to her when she was a child.

That's Trip Friendly. His father is Ed Friendly, and Ed is the first reason Little House landed on television screens. At the time. Ed was a highly regarded television producer, best known for creating the program Roan and Martin's Laughing.

He went back and talked about it with my mother, and my mother said, I've been telling you for years what great books they are and that you should make a teeny series based on them. So he borrowed one of my sister's books. He took it on a business trip. A couple of days later, stopped at the magazine racket at the airport and bought a Time magazine and hid it inside the Time magazine. I'm the airplane so no one would see who was reading a children's book.

And when he landed, he.

Immediately realized what he had in his hands, and so he called his attorney and asked him to find out if the rights were available. And my father invited Roger to come and meet with him, and they spent a weekend together in Los Angeles.

That weekend resulted in Friendly obtaining the rights to turn the books into a television show.

He thought the books were a national treasure. His goal was to try to bring the magic of those books to the screen.

At least that was the plan. This was the mid seventies, and the concept of setting a wholesome family show on the American frontier did not exactly speak to the times Father who.

Was turned down by virtually every studio and network because at the time they all told him Westerns are dead, this material is too soft. It's nice, they're great books.

But but but.

In March nineteen seventy four, America was at the height of Watergate, Vietnam was still raging, the country was experiencing extreme inflation. There was a lot of sharp, timely social commentary on primetime TV, and a lot of people watching. The most popular show was All in the Family, average viewership twenty million. In fact, the average weekly viewership of the top ten shows in nineteen seventy four was around

I mean, I try to explain this to Charlie all the time, that he lives in a content utopia where he can just dial up magically any episode of any show ever created and watch it as many times as he wanted, Whereas if we saw a show, especially when we were much younger, we may never see it again.

I remember one of my favorite Little House episodes came on and I skipped swim practice because I was like, I've been waiting for this episode for years to see. And the thing too, is like when we talk about how wholesome Little House was, The Waltons was also on TV in the seventies at the same time.

Yeah, in my head, they're the same thing. Even though I grew up in the eighties and I know that my mom watched both Little House and The Waltons, and to me it just seemed really cheesy. I wasn't paying enough attention to either of them.

Yeah, if I was to differentiate them for listeners and for you, I would say the Waltons was sort of like the Depression, and Little House in the Prairie was like sex appeal. Hollywood Michael Landon with you know, his muscles and his hair and a smile, and clearly had shaved his chest, although I didn't understand that as a kid. Like there was so much sex appealed a little house in the prairie. It was like a Western. It was like Hollywood.

Hold on, I'm googling pictures of Michael Landon and his hair. Is that's some nice hair. That's some real nice hair. Oh my gosh, look at his chest.

Yeah, he was always finding reasons to take his shirt off. He was always breaking his ribs somehow so that they had to take a shirt off and wrap them up in like some sort of like prairie tensor bandage. He glistens, He really listens. Nobody looked like that on the Waltons.

Let me tell you, all right, just make me a list of your top ten episodes. I'll dive into some Michael Landon when I'm alone later this evening.

Being a sex symbol was not a new experience for Michael Landon. In the early seventies, Landon was known to the world as Little Joe, the youngest son of the wealthy ranch owning Cartwright family on the television western Bonanza At the height of its run, it was the number one rated show in the country, clocking nineteen million viewers weekly. Landon, who was in his mid twenties, was a teen idol

My father knew Michael because he was very close friends with Lauren Green, who was the patriarch on Bonanza.

Here's Trip Friendly again.

And so he called Michael and he said, I have a project that I'm very interested in having you direct. So he sent my sister with a script up to Michael's house and a few hours later he got a call from Michael saying, I not only want to direct, but I want a stars paw. And so with Michael attached, he went back to NBC, with whom he had a very strong relationship, and he presented him with the package with Michael a directing and Michael starring, and they agreed, if I had.

Her alevelance book, I would mark down how it was when we left our little house in the Big Woods to go west to Remian Territory.

The two hour Little House Pilot aired on March thirtieth, nineteen seventy four. Ed Friendley spent his own money to hire Blanche Handalists to adapt it, and she stuck faithfully to the book Little House on the Prairie.

All right, here, ess here we Come.

The pilot was a huge hit. It was the highest rated television movie of the year. NBC immediately ordered the series, and Little House on the Prairie premiered on September eleventh, nineteen seventy four, seven weeks after Nixon's resignation and one week after I was born. The series starts with an episode called a Harvest of Friends, and it introduced a very different Ingalls family from the one readers knew from

First home is the nicest word.

There is strength and community.

I think you're a welcome edition, dark community.

I thank you hard work work for you in the morning work for Hanson. In the afternoon, you're biting off a big piece God.

Charles Lord's day is set aside for worship and for wrist Michael Landon's thick, flowing curls, Michael Landon's smile, Michael Landon's shirtless and glistening. Michael Landon crying or for't exactly crying in this episode, frequently hobbling his lip. Laura was still there, and Melissa Gilbert was charming and could hold her own in a scene. But there was no doubt who the star of this prairie was. The spotlight had clearly been shifted to Paw and his perfectly lit pecks.

Michael showed himself to be anything but Charles Ingalls.

That's actor Dean Butler. He played heart throb while Mon's a wilder on the show.

Hey, this is a guy who's sitting there with a cigarette and his teeth. He's got his Carrera sunglasses on, his demim shirt opened down halfway down. His chest is sprayed on with the gun jeans, the snakeskin boots, the hair obviously with the ash brown dyed number two in.

It unlike Paw, Michael landed On the Prairie didn't have the iconic beard Laura write so lovingly about in the books. NBC was so concerned Little House book fans would be alarmed by the lack of a beard, they felt it necessary to put out a press release explaining its absence.

Great pains were put into fitting Michael Landon with a beard, both of natural growth and by makeup artis, but it was decided that he just did not look good with any kind of facial hair.

And if Michael Landon did not look good with facial hair, and gosh darn it, he would not have facial hair. He was the star, and the producer and the writer. It was, in short, Michael Landon's Prairie. Millions of people wanted to live there with the ingles for at least one hour a week. Everyone loved Paul, well, almost everyone. His Little House was hitting the airwaves in the fall

I've renamed the series, how affluent is my Prairie?

They have everything but a Cadillac.

My father decided he and Michael had creative differences, and I think he recognized that Michael, as the star of the show, woulout work if Michael left the show, and I think eventually he decided that he did not want to continue with Michael's vision. He had his own vision, so he left the show. But still, you'll see in the credits it's still in an NDC production association within Friendly Production, so he was still very involved without being the producer on the show.

So very quickly into season one, Michael Landon was fully completely in charge well at Friendly's departure from the day to day signaled a major shift behind the scenes. Viewers did not seem to deterred by the fact the show deviated from the books, or by Landon's central role, or by criticism that it was too sacharin a sweet and low Walton said People Magazine the show was sacrin but

But anyway, when this came along, it was fresh for me because it was honest, and it was simple and very basic, and I liked the people. I thought the people were nice, and I kind of thought my family would like to watch that. I got a lot of kids, and it's kind of fun to think you're going to do a show that you would be happy to sit in the living room with the whole family and watch.

Landon's idea a family friendly fair was a combination of adventure, wholesomeness and hard times, and while the books provided some of this, Landon often went with what he knew, and he had definitely known his own hard times as a child. Or Eugene Horowitz in nineteen thirty six, Landon claimed to have been ostracized as a child because he was Jewish. He'd also had a painful relationship with his mother. This is what he told People magazine in nineteen eighty five

I always wanted to get away from my family. Mother was a childish person who was always attempting suicide. She would stick her head in the oven, but she always had knee pads on the floor, or one window open. In a family like that, you get to thinking, Gee, if it's Tuesday, it must be suicide.

Landon was famously a bedwetter as a child. I say famously because he talks about it freely. He even made a TV movie about this in nineteen seventy six called The Loneliest Runner. Well, I don't recall any bed wedding episodes in Little House, though presumably there was bed wedding in the eighteen seventies. It was these traumas from his own childhood land And was drawing on when he stepped into the Little House Writer's room, and.

He could do in a really an intensely real way.

This is Rick Okie. In the nineteen seventies, he was an NBC exec in charge of a host of iconic programs, The Wonderful World of Disney, Chips, Night Rider, and of course Little House on the Prairie, where he witnessed Michael Landon's creative process firsthand. In the writer's room.

I would watch him.

Sometimes we'd be sitting talking about a plotter, about an episode, and he would lean back and he would close his eyes, and you know, it's hard to sit in a room that's silent when you're supposed to be making a contribution. I would open my mouth to say something and the other one of the writers in the room would sort of put his hand on my chest and say wait.

Much like real life Laura, who reworked the hard times of her childhood into magical stories, Landon in many ways did the same.

And it could go on for minutes where he would just sit there, and when he would sit back up and open his eyes, he'd say, when I was a kid, And he would tell a story out of his own life, and you just have you glued because he was a great yarn spinner, and you're asking yourself, how does this

Some of those storylines were loosely connected to actual events in the book, some less so, and some were Landon's attempt to stay current.

You know, Mike was always interested in taking issues that were current and putting them in that frame of a period piece that allowed you to explore them without being offensive, kind of the way that Mash was able to explore the Vietnam War because it wasn't Vietnam, it was the Korea, but it was Vietnam when we all knew it. That's what they were talking about it.

He proved to audiences that even if the show was sentimental and melodramatic, it could speak to what was happening in their world. A Little House did speak to Vietnam and a host of other contemporary issues.

The Civil War soldier who comes back and he has PTSD or shell shocks.

To be there and he's addicted to morphy. This is the same year when Vietnam veterans were coming.

Home addicted to heroin.

Hello, how many people were living that episode.

That's Alison Arngrahm, who played Nellie Olsen on the show.

So we were doing these episodes where the women are want the right to own property.

We had episodes about alcoholism, about drugs, We had child abuse, we had spousal abuse.

We did work all those things out, and a lot of things were covered on nineteen seventy shows like All in the Family or Maude. We were sneaking them into but everybody was in bonnets, so it was somehow safe and okay, and of course Paul and Mau were there to help you deal with it.

So Little House could be current and comforting. But this was primetime TV after all, and just like today, the networks needed to draw eyeballs, and just like today, viewers love drama. Rick Oakie's job was to deliver the studio execs dramatic demands to Michael Landon.

It was always Who's going to have a baby? Is there going to be a wedding? Is there going to be a funeral? Is somebody going to die? What event can you create for us? And I was the unfortunate messenger who had to go over to Michael Landon and go hate to say this, but what have you got planned for November? Because that's when the ratings sweeps happened, and that's when advertisers make their buys.

If you grew up in the heyday of primetime television, you knew the sweeps shows. Even if you didn't know what sweeps was. They were often the two parters. They were unmissible. Think of the time they had to remove the bomb on Grey's Anatomy. That was a sweeps show once again, it was Rick Oki who had to deliver this task to Michael.

And he would say, let me think about it. And then by the time I drove back to my office in Burbank, my boss would come in and go, what did you say to Michael. He's like, he's you know, we're going to do the show where Merlin Olsen's wife dies in a fire. And you know, he would always come through with, you know, without being untrue to the

What Landon delivered was a mix of sentimentality, Western romance, and cultural relevance, which was rating's gold but could also result in some serious weirdness. Even now, when you're out in the world having conversations with people about Little House, the episodes they remember best always seemed to be the strangest I watched the TV show.

I've tried to explain some of the episodes to other tour guides now and they're like, they did what the TV show?

Really?

There's some they.

Locked she locks someone in the ice house.

That's that's me and Emily at lunch and just met South Dakota with Diane, Cheryl, and Marie, the women who run the Laura Ingles Wilder Memorial Society. I didn't think they'd be into Michael Landon's antics, but when I brought up the TV show, we immediately launched right into our favorite episodes, which also happened to be the strangest ones.

An actor, right, we convince lots to me, I'm going back to TJ. Look her in the middle House on the prairie.

We can go there.

When the Little House actors get approached by fans, The fans immediately tell them about their favorite episodes.

People always want to talk about a matter and me cutting off my leg.

The Back to School one with the Cinnamon Chicken.

And the mud Fight Bunny where I go down the hill in the wheelchair. But I did pretend to be paralyzed to ruin everyone's life.

I send the children home early because there was going to be a blizzard. Michael called it. Miss Beetle kills the kids again.

I hear a bet.

The Lord is My Shepherd a lot. It's my favorite too.

That, of course is Melissa Gilbert. She played Laura on the show, and The Lord Is My Shepherd is my favorite episode two. It's also the perfect example of how Michael Landon spun the real stories of the Ingles family into something utterly wild and memorable and perfectly crafted for primetime TV. The episode The Lord Is My Shepherd is based on something that actually happened to the Ingles, which

In the books, the English don't have a son, and there's no baby who dies, never spoke of it. And then in the TV show, of course, Michael said, what that's like the greatest episode ever. Of course we're going to do that.

The TV episode adheres to these basic facts and then embellishes. Here's what happens in the episode, Ma has a new baby boy. Laura gets jealous of all the attention the new baby boy is getting, and when he gets sick, she refuses to pray for him. When the baby dies, she concludes it's her fault and she decides to get as close to God as possible literally.

And then, of course Laura runs away to a mountain. How she found a mountain in Minnesota?

I always say she ran across four states to like Colorado or something.

I don't know.

It finds a big mountain at that and then at the top of.

The mountain, Easier in his bourg dying, who is apparently galled, and yet it is genius and it totally works. It is one of the best episodes ever of like anything.

It did work. Everyone we spoke to remembered this episode, and they also remembered another one. You know it, even if you don't think you know it. Perhaps no episode has given so many children nightmares than the episode called Sylvia.

And of course the Sylvia episode, or as people do refer to it, clown rape.

But I'm not laughing because it's funny, but that is the way people refer to it.

It's a very very disturbing episode. And they had that clown who was molesting everybody and raping everybody. There was a period in my childhood where every time I saw it was the same episode, which is the one that featured us sexual assault. Oh my god, it was a lot.

Here's what happens. Sylvia is about a young girl in Walnut Grove named Sylvia who is sexually assaulted one day on the way home from school in the woods by a man who is wearing a creepy clownish mask. She gets pregnant, and her angry father threatens to throw her out. The angles adopted son, Albert, offers to marry Sylvia so

And I remember when he called me aside and he said, I want to do a show or one of the girls in town gets raped, and it was really controversial and the network you had a hard time, but he dug his heels in and said, nope, We're doing this show. I'm going to write it myself, I'll direct it myself. It'll be well done, don't worry.

And it was.

What was the response to that show mixed? Mixed reviews are still mixed. On the one hand, Sylvia provided a narrative for an issue not often talked about on mainstream television. On the other hand, the ridiculous framing around it makes it a joke among fans to understand how this lands now. I told Joe to watch Sylvia.

Oh, I watched Sylvia that is some messed up shit that happens in Sylvia, and you and Emily both prepared me that this was the quote unquote clown rape episode, but I still think that there was a part of me that didn't believe you, that didn't really think that that was a thing that was going to exist in

Yeah, I mean, so much of it is so dated. Inevitably, it's like a fifty year old episode, and it's so weird, Like the clown aspect of it is so weird to the mime.

A clown mime I mean, I think mime is worse than clown, to be honest.

Yeah, but I think to be clear, this is not a defense of Sylvia, but I think sometimes if you think of Sylvia like that episode aired in like nineteen eighty, I think, and I feel like can be viewed from our vantage point as a sort of early version of an ABC after school special if you remember the ones we grow up on. And I think it had the ability to give children experiencing, you know, sexual trauma or abuse, some sort of language or something to point to and say,

I hear you that in this episode. In the Sylvia episode, it tackled sexual assault and rape, and Sylvia gets pregnant in the episode in a place where families could talk about it afterwards, right, Families could watch together and then maybe give language to something that they didn't know how to talk about before, much like the Very Special episodes of the sitcoms that came a few years later in the eighties, And there was the Mister Belvedere episode where

Do you remember that one?

Yeah?

There is also that Punky Brewster episode. There was a bunch of weird Punky Brewster episodes like that really stick out in your head. The Challenger episode, I think she was also.

Where the space Shuttle explodes. The Space Shuttle actually actually explodes on Punky Brister.

Yeah, so I think like Sylvia is before all of this. So in the eighties, by the time we were watching all these shows in primetime, this felt much less strange. But when Sylvia aired on a family show in primetime and this was the storyline, I just feel like probably some of the weirdness of the plotting fell away and it was maybe helpful and also probably like a lot of people were, you know, couldn't take their eyes off

It's a disturbing, bizarro strange episode, is what it is.

And also Michael Landen knew what he was doing. Like, both things are true at the same time. It's so weird, it's also relevant. And also it's forty three years ago and we're still talking about it, so I clearly the man knew something. In the same way, Sylvia tackled what in hindsight feels like a progressive subject for primetime television in nineteen eighty and also depicted progressive attitudes around sex. Little House of TV series could occupy both extremes too.

That summer of twenty twenty, when the country was going through what the country, the world was going through, that massive social upheaval and unrest all around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and all of the horrible injustices that were going on, the Wisdom of Solomon came up a lot.

That's TV Laura Melissa Gilbert again and she's talking about an episode from season three called The Wisdom of Solomon, guest starring then kid actor Todd Bridges, who would go on to star in the eighty sitcom Different Strokes. In the episode, Bridges plays a young black boy named Solomon who runs away from his family because he wants an education.

I want to go to school like all the mother children.

That's the white man's school.

With honey, you can't go there.

Why if we're free?

Why canna he eventually comes across the Ingles, who are kind to him and give him food and shelter and take him to school. Laura, who has never met a black person before, wipes Solomon's face to see if the black will come off his skin. Melissa Gilbert acknowledges that this scene felt cringey even when she was filming it.

I asked not to do it. I said to Michael, I can't do that. That's horrible. He said, yeah, but we're trying to show people how wrong it is to be ignorant and how open Laura is to learning something new. And I said, okay, well then I'll do it, but you're I mean, I had to say, you're a real Negro person and wipe the black guff with his face.

What you're doing, you are a real one.

As a fact I've never a real ego person before was absurd to me. But once it was explained that this is what we were doing and the lessons we were teaching, that was impactful to me because I realized that our show was more than just Laura's story.

The truth Little House was trying to get at in this episode was not one many primetime TV shows would have explored the climax arrives when Solomon stuns Charles Ingalls with a profound question.

Would you rather be black and live to be one hundred?

Well?

Why I live to be fifty?

This clip routinely makes the rounds on Twitter and TikTok.

I was hearing on Twitter from people like Jamie Fox and Biola Davis who knew Little House of the Prairie was so woke and I'm sitting and hungry.

I did, I did?

I knew.

Here's writer and children's literature professor Lizzie Skurnik, describing watching this episode as a child in the eighties.

Actually peaked suring myself watching it in my parents' bedroom after school, like sitting on the floor in front of their bed, probably with my brother.

You know, my mother is black, my.

Father is Jewish.

It didn't make me mad.

But then there's the idea of like, this is always how black people show up on shows.

We're always on one show.

They just have to have a thing for white people to connect with those White people refuse to connect with black people as human beings.

White people were interested in black people insofar as they were able to give black people a chance to say racism was bad, thereby featuring themselves as people who thought.

Racism was bad, but thence we all know, not particularly interested in the actual story of any black people.

This is especially notable when you consider there is a character in this episode, doctor Taine, who's based on a real life black doctor named doctor Tan. Doctor Tan appears in the book Little House on the In the TV show, doctor Tayane is jaded and angry because white townspeople won't let him practice medicine. This is a far cry from doctor Tan's real story.

In that episode is like life is hard, and then it's like the real Doctan was doing great. You know, the real Doctan was the only doctor on the prairie and a true doctor in that he saw everybody and everybody saw him, and he was a terrific businessman.

So in that sense, it was kind of annoying. But then on the other hand, Todd Bridges is famous.

Lizzie and I are the same age and grew up with Little House reruns after school. By the time we encountered The Wisdom of Solomon, its guest star, Todd Bridges was very famous from different strokes.

So you know, you're feeling like Oh, this is Chid Bridges.

This is cool today. Clips from the Wisdom of Solomon can feel shockingly ahead of their time, but the truth is the episode was very much of its moment. The Wisdom of Solomon originally aired in nineteen seventy seven, just weeks after the final episode of the mini series Roots. Roots was based on Alex Haley's best selling novel about slavery, and its final episode remains the second most watched overall

Whenever I look at these shows as it grown up, I always just see a group of people around a table trying to think of ideas, Like I think you.

Can, like see this spitballing coming from a mile away.

Does that mean these stories can't have a positive effect, Lizzie thinks, oftentimes they actually underscore a larger problem, the same problem that's in the Little House Books.

The show then creates the reality that people think existed.

If you talk about the Frontier, people think the frontier was white, but I do think the dangerous propaganda being like, oh, well, you know, you're just telling an ancillary story when you talk about black people on the prairie, tech about the Native Americans, because people have absorbed this idea that white people are central, and it's like, hey, like I'm not being an activist, I'm being accurate. White people are not central to American culture.

Native American scholar Gwen Westerman also remembers watching Little House as a kid.

I love the TV show, but I never thought that much about it. Coming to it as an adult has been a much different experience. We were on a trip somewhere and watching TV in the hotel room when the episode of Little House on the came on, and it was in the winter and a Dakota man helped save Paw from the blizzard. And once we got past the terrible makeup the clothes that the man was wearing, they made him look like the typical Hollywood stereotype of Indian.

Similar to Lizzie saying she was excited to see Todd Bridges, this conversation feels complicated by the fact that even insulting descriptions on screen were sometimes better than not seeing yourself at all.

So to see Native people on TV, even in the caricature, was during that period of validation that we existed. So those were representations, but they.

Were not the.

Reality that I knew growing up in a very strong and vibrant intertribal community. So we always kind of had to balance that, but at least there was validation there that people knew that we existed.

Despite Landon's desire to make Little House relevant when it came to depictions of Native Americans, he was unable or unwilling to translate events right outside his door onto his fictional prairie. Another one one that even as a kid, I was aware of, are the women on the prairie. The girls were fine, but the grown women not so much.

We're reflecting the eighteen hundred to one women had zero rights and a reflection of the nineteen seventies, where women had maybe a half a point of rights.

The issue of women's rights seems like it could be good to copy now, especially since the second wave feminist movement was raging and Landon was surrounded by self avowed feminists. Here's Lizzie again.

The first show the livitations of their creator.

You know, you might not learn a lot about the prairie from Little House on the Prairie, but you learn a lot about Michael Landon and the seventies and television, and you know, male ideals and feminine ideals.

Sometimes more modern storylines came through, but those feminine ideals were ever present.

And we even touched on women's rights and chauvinism and the mistreatment of women at the same time, while marginalizing women to do nothing but poor coffee, sometimes for many episodes at a time. One of the most staunch feminists I know was Karen Gresley, who was one of the great coffee pourers of all time.

I felt myself to be a polar opposite of Carolyn Ingoes.

That's Karen Grassley, the actor who played Laura's beloved ma.

I wasn't married, I didn't have children. I was, you know, from the sexual revolution. I mean, the little woman had never been my goal, and so there were times when the choices offered to Carolyn in the script wrinkled.

But Karen is quick to acknowledge that Michael knew what he was doing. He was directing the most crowd pleasing version of events, creating the wholesome family center that would make the show a hit.

And this is not at all a criticism. This is just an example of how Michael knew his vision, and he knew what he wanted and in fact was well connected to his audience. He knew what they wanted to do.

And what every audience in all of history is wanted is romance. And there's very little of it in the Little House Books. Even Laura Almonso's courting is chased, but naturally there's plenty of romance on Landon's prairie. Mister Edwards goes according Mary, falls in love, gets jilted, falls in love again. But nothing compares to what happens to Laura the second she hits puberty. Like the second from girl in Braids to boy obsessed teen will obsessed with one

So my name is Dean Butler, and I played al Manzil Wilder from nineteen seventy nine through nineteen eighty three on the Little House television series.

At the beginning of season six, Dean Butler was cast as Laura's love interest and future husband, al Manzo Wilder. At the time, Dean was twenty three and Melissa so Gilbert was fifteen.

I mean, I can't even tell you what a girl I was. I mean, I was a gidget fourteen, fifteen years old, not need bucktooth, still had braces on.

I towered over her. You know, I'm six one and a half. Melissa was what five ' five something like that. She always commented the fact that you know that I drove my own car the set, that I.

Shaved, I'd been on a date and kissed a boy.

I was just so much bigger than she was.

Well, I can tell you from the lens of today, you can't do that. There's no way they could shoot it. There's no way they would cast it that way, and there's certainly no way it would be handled the way it was handled.

Sweet sixteen is the second to last episode of season six. Laura has had a crush and all Monso for the entire season, but her affection has not been returned, and she's given up hope taking a teaching job out of town. Her hair has gone up into a bun, so we know she's a grown up now. Almanza sees a lot of day and at the end of this episode, they kiss. According to IMDb, it's one of the highest rated episodes of the series. Melissa Gilbert was fifteen when they filmed it.

Now we have intimacy coordinators and we have all this dialogue around being comfortable and feeling safe, which is amazing. Nobody talked to me about it. It was just it was nobody said, are you uncomfortable? Are you okay? Is this all right? I remember being told that the al Manzo episodes were coming. Fortunately we had a little run

Would be nothing like that today. That would never happen today. But again, Michael's numbers were huge. NBC was not going to screw around with this. You know, it was working. The audience was tuning in, they were watching, they were coming to see this, and they came to see this romance in enormous numbers.

Three episodes later, at the beginning of season seven, Lauren Almonzo, Mary, I must tell you that even as a kid, this did not stand out to me as a problem at all, which I told Dean in our conversation. No, as a kid watching, I was just like, oh, this makes complete sense, and now her hair isn't embraids anymore. But I'm quite

Sure you had married Jel eighteen.

Oh right.

But I also think, like we have a different Our understanding of age and age differences has shifted dramatically even since the eighties, in good ways. But it's a different conversation than I just.

Thought this was real life too, So just to be clear, there.

Was no like, would this actress have had a problem. I was like, well, it's Lauren Almonzo. These contradictions within the Little House series were one week you'd see something that felt boundary breaking, and the next week something that felt sort of like a strange cultural throwback. In many ways, mirror the contradictions inherent to Michael Landon himself. On the one hand, he was a family man who ran his set as a tight ship so that his crew could

Most of the television shows that we did in those days, they'd work you till ten eleven o'clock at night and he had to come back in at like six in the morning, and they didn't care. They would pay for it. But Michael was a family man and the guys, all the men and women that worked for him on the crew, being at families like every on the television show, but who cared. Michael made sure they got home for dinner at seven.

On the other hand, he had a rather messy personal life at times, certainly not one Charles Ingalls would have led on the Prairie.

This was a man who espoused family values and community values, and was married three times and had children, was three different women, and was deeply flawed and human. But who isn't doesn't mean he's a bad person. It just means he's a human person.

Everyone we spoke with talks about Michael Landon's incredible work ethic, and his respect for his cast and crew. Alison Arngrim writes in her memoir that the child actors of Little House boast that there have been no arrests and no convictions. Michael was devoted to the show and protective over his creative vision, which is most visible, and how he decided to end the show. So, Joe, guess how the series ends?

Alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, an invasion of a clown mime army.

Close. But no, they blow up Walnut Grove.

No they don't. They blow up the town.

Yeah, A tycoon comes in and buys all of the land and all of the buildings in Walnut Grove and they can't get any of them back, so their only recourse is to blow up the entire town.

As one does, as one does.

I think I went back to this as a teenager to remember if I remembered this correctly. Because I watched this, I was old enough to watch this in primetime, and for years I wondered if I'd imagined it, they blow up the entire town. Yeah, And the thing is they blew They actually blew the set up in real life because Michael Landon did not want anyone else coming along and using his little House on the Prairie set, so he blew it up, and he wrote the episode around that.

That's such a dude thing to do. It's like mine, mine, mine, no one else, no one else is going to be here after I'm gone.

And then the crazy thing too is the last shot of the last episode is they don't blow up the Little House like they don't blow up the iconic Little House. That's the empty little House is the last shot. And in real life he also didn't blow up the Little House. It burnt down in a fire, like a random fire years later. So, I mean, the blurring of fact and fiction in the Little House world continues right to the very end of the television series.

Michael Landon was a real special kind of trip, is is what I'm gotting from this episode?

Go Landon was? I mean, cosmically speaking, it sort of feels like could there have been a more perfect person to continue the Little House legacy? Truly, He's sort of perfectly formed for it.

Honestly, what do you think Laura would have thought of what became of her legacy on these TV shows?

So, Like, in doing this episode, the funny thing I kept coming back to is the similarities between Rose and Michael Landon, Like two people who were amazing storytellers and you know, could take these simple tales and then fictionalize them in a way that we can't get enough of, and take these characters and turn them into sort of these like heroic male heroes. Rose, as we know, loved taking men and turning their biographies into these heroic story so I kind of feel like Rose would have loved

They tapped into Laura's story in such a way to create some completely bonkers content.

It completely bonkers.

So look, Laura was clearly beloved. Her stories are clearly beloved. And what I'm taken away from this episode is that Michael Landon was very beloved.

Even the people we talked to who talked about him being complicated or flawed, everybody loved him. Like literally everybody loved him. People followed him around. He was beloved. Michael Landon remained a beloved figure for the rest of his career, and then in nineteen ninety one, at the age of fifty four, he called a press conference at his home

Got a pilot you made for this fall.

That's right, called us, called us, made it for CBS.

I don't get better.

It's their second mistake since buying baseball.

So you know, I was a.

Little worried about this interview. Now you've made me feel much better.

Whatever his complications, Michael Landon made everyone feel better, So it was even more shocking when he died just two months later. But as Landon predicted way back when he conceived of the show. Decades later, Little How lives on.

He said, you know everyone's going to be watching these shows long after we're all gone, he said, long after I'm dead. It was like this prophetic thing and everyone he said it to it, Yeah right, oh by it, and like didn't believe him.

We didn't get it, Michael got a half century later. The stars of the show continue to draw huge audiences in real life. People come to fan conventions, to events at the actual Laura Ingalls houses, to book signings.

We get the people who come for autographs and sometimes they cry because it's so intense to meet the person that you've grown up watching. I know, Melissa Gilbert, obviously it's Laura shed People just go into a coma. A lot of people don't think they're gonna be emotional that they meet Maw and that voice and she sounds the same and she's so sweet you that's I see. People really lose it over. Charlotte Stewart, Missus Beadle.

All the actors we spoke with, seems grateful to be part of the Little House legacy.

Cute visit Wanna Grove is to relax and know that people are about to show up for each other.

When I got Little House on the Prairie, people in Hollywood went, what Little House on the What?

Oh?

How boring?

Well, guess what, We're still on the air.

It's as big a gift as anything I've ever received in my life. To be associated with those books, with that woman, with those stories, with that television show is the gift of a lifetime.

Not a day goes by that I don't think about Little House in the Prairie or mention something to do with Little House in the Prarie, or Laura or Rose or the Ingles relatives, or something that has something to do with them. And it's so infused in my being at this point.

Sometimes it feels like Laura Ingles Wilder has had nine lives. She's been reimagined so many times, for better and for worse. When Laura and Rose sat down to write the books, Laura wanted to preserve her family's legacy. She had no idea she was creating such a lasting brand, but that's exactly what she did. Laura not only inspired a TV show we're still watching, she launched the careers of many