‘Little House on the Prairie’ Stars Alison Arngrim, Dean Butler & Rachel Lindsay Greenbush Talk Netflix Reboot (Exclusive)

Last week, news of a Little House on the Prairie series on Netflix sharply divided the beloved show’s fan community: “People are like, ‘Oh my God, yay, a reboot. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened. The second coming,'” Alison Arngrim, who played the villainous Nellie Oleson, told ReMIND. “Or [they’re saying] ‘No, no, no, not a reboot. The show is perfect. Don’t touch it.’ And they’re getting upset about it.”
Some people who aren’t upset about it? Arngrim and her costars Dean Butler, who played Almanzo, and Rachel Lindsay Greenbush, who played Carrie. The cast members spoke to ReMIND about their feelings toward the new series, how Little House was ahead of its time, and why fans still flock to the show, 40 years after it aired its final episode.
And don’t worry — the new show is not actually a reboot of the original 1974 series. Rather, its a re-imagining. Or, as Arngrim put it, “This [show] is part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder multiverse.”
What the new series will — and won’t — be
Butler got a call from Trip Friendly, head of Friendly Family Productions and son of original Little House producer Ed Friendly, to give him a heads-up that a new series was in the works. “There have been so many different announcements about reboots or re-imaginings” through the years, says Butler. “But this had a different feel to it. This felt like this was really real.”
Arngrim says that this new series will take inspiration not from the show, which ran from 1974 to 1983 under the watchful guidance of creator and star Michael Landon, but from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original series of Little House books. “It’s not really like a reboot, they’re not going back to Walnut Grove,” says Arngrim. “They’re not going to have Doc Baker and Miss Beadle, and they’re certainly not going to have Al Burton, and all the people who were made up for the show. It is going back to the books.”
Given their long family legacy with the series, Arngrim says the Friendlys understand exactly what made the original show, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder story, so special: “So concerns that they’re going to run amok away from the books and make it into something weird — not happening. [Trip]’ll pull the plug on it before anything like that happens.”
Rachel Lindsay Greenbush thinks Little House might be the antidote to the social media era

Everett Collection
Is the world ready for a new Little House series? Rachel Lindsay Greenbush definitely is. The actress — who jokes that she was “a prop” when she started on the show at age 3 alongside sister Sidney — thinks that our disconnected era needs the show’s message of community more than ever. “I think it’s great,” says Greenbush of the new series. “I think with social media, we tend to think of ourselves more as individuals — and in the story of the series and the books, it’s more about community as a whole, and your neighbor. And I think that’s needed more today.”
In addition, “a lot of the fans have really craved more historical content in the story,” says Greenbush. So a series more anchored in the realities of pioneer life — “It was a hard time, but it was a simpler time,” she notes — might really resonate with them. And it’s not just fans: Greenbush says, “I can’t wait to see it come out, I can’t wait to watch it.”
> Learn More About the Real Ingalls Family, Made Famous by ‘Little House on the Prairie’
Alison Arngrim is ready for the Laura Ingalls Wilder multiverse
In Arngrim’s eyes, a new Little House series makes perfect sense in a media landscape heavy on sequels, prequels, adaptations and re-imaginings like the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel universes.
“There are many properties that do get remade with whole new cast and whole new looks and whole new ways of looking at it quite successfully,” says Arngrim. “And we often find, ‘Oh, that one didn’t work. That one wasn’t good. Oh, I really like this one better than that one.’ So as strange as it may sound, Laura Ingalls books and Little House on the Prairie may be one of those things that is eternal and it’s just going to keep happening. It’s kind of like you have the multiverse, the superhero multiverse. … This is like that. This is part of the Laura Ingalls Wilder multiverse.”
Dean Butler thinks “it will be different”

Everett Collection
For Butler, with the announcement, “one of the first feelings, in all honesty, is probably, well, ‘If this works, are they going to forget about what we did all those years ago?’ And then the next thought is, ‘It’s going to be very difficult to create something that touches people’s hearts in the way that the original did.'”
Butler says that series creator Michael Landon, in his years on Bonanza, Little House, and later Highway to Heaven, developed a “certain specific kind of touching, personal, intimate storytelling about the human condition” that’s connected with audiences across generations. Landon knew his audience, but, says Butler, in the decades since, “the audience has changed. What is the television audience and what do they want? … There’s a very different expectation. And if this adaptation of Little House can meet the expectation of this more current audience and bring along a few of those who have loved it, it’s going to be very successful.”
However, the new show will exist on its own terms. “It’s never going to be what Michael did,” says Butler. “Michael was Michael. He was a unique creative presence with this magical touch with an audience. And look, the creative team on the new show may also have a magical touch with an audience, but it’s a different touch and it will be different.”

What they thought of that Megyn Kelly tweet
.@Netflix if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project. https://t.co/RkAO8vPq65
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 30, 2025
Soon after the new series was announced, former Fox News and NBC News host Megyn Kelly took to X.com to announce, “@Netflix if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” But, as Arngrim and Butler both noted, the original Little House already addressed complex social issues with sensitivity and depth.
“Well, the [original] show was about as woke as you could get for 1974,” says Arngrim. “We dealt with … everything on Little House on the Prairie from drug addiction to racism, to sexism, to spousal abuse. Women’s rights, we absolutely had the episode where the women held out for right to own property. … Every possible cutting-edge social issue was absolutely discussed … but it was done in such a ‘Little House on the Prairie, what would the Ingalls do’ kind of way, that I think people just didn’t even think of it as being a big deal.”
“Little House was incredibly woke,” says Butler. “It’s just woke in a very simple, sweet way. It’s not beating you over the head with it, but it’s really woke — and from that, I’m going to say I think woke is a good thing. I don’t think woke is a bad thing. Woke has been turned into a dirty word. It’s not a dirty word. Woke is aware, it’s progressive, it’s understanding that the world ebbs and flows and changes.”
In fact, Butler thinks that very sensitivity and sense of progressiveness accounts for the show’s lasting and far-reaching success: “The show still runs in 140 countries every day, all over the world in over 40 languages. There’s a reason for that. And the reason is because everybody feels welcome there, and Michael made sure that everybody could feel welcome there.”
Advice for actors on the new series
“I have no advice for actors,” laughs Butler. “Anybody who gets hired to do this is going to be hired to do it because they have an essential quality that someone’s looking at and says, ‘This person is right for the world that we’re creating.’ … So just be you, just actors, just be you and go do your work.”
Greenbush suggests that actors on the show who are also enough “read the books, or at least the first book. Look into [Wilder’s] life as a young girl when she speaks about it, so you’ll get the feeling of what she emanated. And then you’ll be able to, as an actress, layer that character.”
“It’s going to be hard,” says Arngrim. “I feel great sympathy, because I know that no matter how brilliant all of these actors could be … they’re going to get compared, by some viewers and certainly by press, to Michael Landon and some poor little girl’s going to get compared to Melissa Gilbert.”
To any future Nellies, however, Arngrim has specific advice: “Don’t hold back. Don’t worry about being liked. Don’t say, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it quite that way. It’s too harsh. People won’t like me.’ Say it that way. Make them hate you. Good job. Have a very grounded sense of self so that you are fully aware that you are you and she’s her. Because people are going to hate her.”
This is hard-won advice — an enraged Nellie-hater once threw an orange soda at Arngrim while she rode in the Santa Claus Lane Hollywood Christmas Parade, and she was later kicked in the butt during an Easter fair. To Arngrim, these incidents are compliments: “If you’ve made a total stranger who doesn’t even know you hate you so much they want to throw food at you, what are you doing? You had to have been convincing. … They believed you with such totality, Laurence Olivier would be jealous.”
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Why Little House connects with fans so deeply

NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection
Why are so many of us not just fans, but obsessives about Little House decades after it first aired? “Little House has been the family that they wish they had for many people,” says Butler. “For others, it’s been an affirmation of the family they did have. But I think that Michael created a space for audiences to come in and feel like they had a seat at that dinner table, and they were part of this.” All the show’s villains were ultimately redeemable, says Butler, and tragedies didn’t lead to misery and hopelessness in Walnut Grove: “It’s not that tragedy wasn’t going to occur because tragedy always occurred, but what Michael wrote about and what Laura wrote about was the grace with which people handled that tragedy.”
“There was enormous aspiration in what Michael was doing,” Butler says. “Michael said years ago, ‘People will be watching this long after we’re all gone.’ Well, at 25, when he said that, it felt a little hyperbole to me. It’s like, ‘come on now.’ Now, at 68, I’m looking at this, and I’m saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely people are going to be watching this.”
There’s also just something about Walnut Grove, says Arngrim, who recalls that many fans became so immersed in the show, they forgot it was filmed on sets: “I’ve had grown grownup people who are even in show business go, ‘I want to visit the town.’ ‘Do you mean the real Walnut Grove in Minnesota?’ ‘No, no, no. The town.’ ‘You mean the sets where we filmed? They’re not there anymore.””
“Our show hit a real emotional nerve with people,” says Arngrim. “And I think because they watched it as kids and during really hard times of their life, they take everything about Little House on the Prairie deeply, deeply personally. Which is really cool. To be on a show that people take that personally, oh my God, that’s fantastic.”
> ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Cast Members Reveal They Took Hair & Wood From Set
What are the cast doing now and where can you find them?

Loreen Sarkis/Getty Images
Greenbush does fan event appearances and has some in the works for the coming months; you can follow her on Facebook.
Butler is working behind the camera these days, but has been a frequent face at fan events. Now, he and Arngrim are going to take it one step further, creating their own event company: Prairie Legacy Productions. “We are in the midst of developing all the licensing that will allow us to do these events using the Little House on the Prairie intellectual property, because that’s such an important part of it. It has to be more than just showing up to sign autographs somewhere. There has to be more of an experience than that. And that’s what we are working on with Trip and Rebecca Friendly to achieve the ability to create something that’s more immersive.” You can keep up with developments on Butler’s Instagram and Facebook pages.
Arngrim is incredibly busy with a wide variety of projects. She’ll be performing one-woman comedy shows all over the world this year — she’ll be heading to France soon, and will be performing Confessions of a Prairie Bitch in New York City, Chicago, Provincetown and Atlanta, among other locations in the coming months. She’ll also be appearing at a number of Little House events in 2025, including Marshfield Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival in April and the CountryCon in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May. She also hosts two — yes, two! — podcasts, The Alison Arngrim Show and Little House on the Prairie Fifty for 50, co-hosted by Butler and Pamela Bob. And she’s also at work on a cookbook. Does she ever sleep? Find out the answer on her Facebook page or her website, Bonnetheads.
Will anyone from the original cast appear on the new show?
“None of us, as far as I know, our gang, are in at this point,” said Arngrim. But, she says, she’d be open to a role or a cameo: “I have been joking for years that I’m finally old enough to play Mrs. Oleson, so call me.”

1974 (50 Years Ago)
January 2024
In this time capsule issue of ReMIND Magazine we look back 50 years ago to 1974!
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