The miniseries follows the Ingalls family - father Charles (Cameron Bancroft), mother Caroline (Erin Cottrell), and daughters Mary (Danielle Chuchran) and Laura (Kyle Chavarria) - as they leave their friends and family in Pepin, Wisconsin, for the 160 acres promised by the Homestead Act in far-off Kansas. After a perilous journey by wagon across the untamed land, including a harrowing trip across a not-so-frozen lake, they finally settle on the desolate prairie a few days ride from Independence, Kansas. Miles from even their closest neighbors, the Ingalls face innumerable hardships as they struggle to build their house and farm the land, all under the watchful eye of Native Americans not especially pleased to see the white settlers.

The series, basically three TV movies running about 90 minutes each (though crudely further broken into 43-46-minute chunks for DVD) work best as a first-hand accounts of pioneer life as it really was, as experienced by a hard-working but ordinary family, a story wisely told from their extremely limited point-of-view. Teleplay writer Katie Ford and director David L. Cunningham were smart to limit the action to the Ingalls' severely limited vantage point. Once Charles stakes out his little piece of land, the action for the most part stays there, and this accentuates the horrible isolation, anxiety and dependence upon one another pioneers really must have felt and experienced. They're cut off from the rest of the world and when news does reach them, such as a long-awaited letter from Caroline's family, the impact on them is huge. When in the last episode the local Indians appear ready to go to war, the show actually gets pretty intense. Like the Ingalls, the audience has no idea for sure what's going on, and like them hear only the war cries outside as they huddle with other settlers behind boarded-up windows, in edgy scenes that recall the beginning of another Ford film, The Searchers.

Little things, we learn, mean a lot, from the simple pleasure of having glass in a window, to a stick of peppermint candy (a real luxury) to how a few mosquito bites or a tiny spark in the chimney can threaten their very lives. The filmmakers seem aware that the little details were its biggest strengths, zeroing in with tight close-ups of such things in effective ways.

Like the earlier series (which went downhill after a pretty good first season), the Ingalls are pious Christians, almost too saintly and well-scrubbed to be entirely accepted. In this miniseries we're asked to believe the family's incredibly enlightened attitude toward their Native American neighbors ("Aw, they're not all bad!" argues Charles to a neighbor), with Laura practically an activist with the Bureau of Native American Affairs. Still, this is offset with that impressively intense last episode, and the more probably fear and racism toward them as expressed by the Scots (James Cosmo and Gina Stockdale, both very good) a well-meaning older couple living several miles away.

The series gets unnecessarily contemporary in other ways, including a jarringly inappropriate contemporary song heard over a montage in the first episode, and in some of the dialogue between the sisters. Nevertheless, the series is much more historically accurate than the filmed-in-Malibu Walnut Grove of the Michael Landon series.

The acting and production are all fine. The cast doesn't try to imitate their TV series counterparts, though they're still recognizable. Gregory Sporleder's Mr. Edwards, the only other character carried over into the series, makes the most of the role without overdoing it. Impressive restraint is shown with the Alberta, Canada locations.

Video & Audio

Little House on the Prairie is presented in a 16:9 widescreen transfer at 1.77:1 which further distinguishes from the 1974 TV show. Apparently shot in 35mm with high-def broadcasts in mind, the framing looks good and the image is sharp with excellent color, as is the Dolby Digital 5.1 stereo sound. In a peculiar move, the first-half of each 90-minute show suddenly stops half-way through with no end credits, while each second-half show has no opening credits or title card - nothing. I guess this is to indicate bathroom breaks. English subtitles are included, but that's it: no alternate audio or foreign subtitle options. And there are no Extra Features, though this DVD cries out for biographies of the real-life Ingalls. (Laura Ingalls lived to the ripe-old age of 90. She died in 1957.)

Parting Thoughts

Little House on the Prairie is recommended for families and fans of the book and, surprisingly enough, hard-core Western fans.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf - The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune and Taschen's forthcoming Cinema Nippon. Visit Stuart's Cine Blogarama here.