We're only a few minutes into Netflix's new Little House on the Prairie series when we get a genuine action set piece. The Ingalls family, journeying from the big woods of 19th century Wisconsin to a potential new home in a Kansas town called Independence, attempt a river crossing in a spot that's much deeper and faster than what patriarch Charles (Luke Bracey) expected. Their wagon, its supplies, and Charles' wife Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) and children Mary (Skywalker Hughes) and Laura (Alice Halsey) are all on the verge of going under and being swept away.
They survive, of course — this season is adapting only the third of the real Laura Ingalls Wilder's enduring series of eight autobiographical children's books — and when they make it to the far shore, they're greeted by a Black doctor, George Tann (Jocko Simms), who helps tend to injuries picked up during the perilous crossing. As they prepare to keep moving, Laura is excited to spot an Osage girl, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), and spends much of the early episodes trying to meet and then befriend her.
This whole prologue to the family's arrival in Independence could on paper suggest an aggressive attempt to modernize source material that goes back over 90 years. The previous TV adaptation, which ran on NBC from 1974-83 and starred Michael Landon as Charles and Melissa Gilbert as Laura, was usually more gentle and had a predominantly white cast for most of its run. But that series was (very loosely) adapting a later book, when the family lived in Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Its two-hour pilot movie — which condenses the plot of the same book the Netflix show is starting off with — features a similar river crossing scene. Dr. Tann is a character in the Little House on the Prairie book, albeit not as prominent as he is on the show. And much of the tension in that book involves the same conflict this new version centers on: the parcel on which Charles is attempting to build a new life for his family is stolen Osage land, which everyone is hoping and wishing the federal government will buy up and let them keep.