Melissa Gilbert supports ‘Little House’ reboot: ‘There’s plenty of room’ for new stories

When Netflix announced the long-awaited Little House on the Prairie reboot last week, Melissa Gilbert — star of the original series, which ran from 1974-1984 on NBC — decided she was going to keep her mouth shut. Not because she didn’t have anything nice to say, but because she didn’t want her comments to overshadow this new adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved novels.

“I said, ‘I’m just not going to comment. I’m just going to let it be because I want them to have their own thing. And if they need me later, we’ll talk about it,'” Gilbert tells Entertainment Weekly. “But then Megyn Kelly had to open her [long pause] face, and make a — I’m trying really hard lately not to use bad words, so I would just say a cotton-headed ninny-muggins comment about [the reboot].”

Gilbert took to Instagram to speak out against Kelly’s comment — in which the former Fox News host threatened to “absolutely ruin” the Netflix reboot if the streamer chose to “woke-ify” Little House on the Prairie — because it revealed how little Kelly really knew about the OG series. “Did you watch the original? Have you seen the episode ‘The Wisdom of Solomon‘? I don’t think we get more woke than that,” Gilbert continues. “Did she see any of the episodes we did about drug addiction, about nativism, about Native Americans, chauvinists, anti-semitism, rape, child abuse, child neglect, industrialization? I mean, we covered everything that’s going on in the world still. It’s not my job to defend the word ‘woke,’ but to my mind, it just means compassion for all. I don’t understand why that’s a bad thing, and I don’t think anyone can ever convince me of that.”

After playing Laura Ingalls Wilder for a decade of her life, Gilbert says she has no problem with Netflix’s new adaptation, which will begin by following the third book in Wilder’s series.

“I think there’s room in the Little House universe for all different kinds of stories to be told — just like there was always room in the Little Women universe to keep retelling that story,” says the actress, who co-founded the lifestyle brand Modern Prairie in 2022. “These are classic stories, and no one’s done it where they hewed to the books completely. [The original] was Michael Landon’s interpretation, and now it’s time for someone else’s interpretation. And I think there’s plenty of room for that. And I think there’s a lot of other stories to mine beyond that. So I think this opens the door in a lot of ways for all kinds of Little House on the Prairie projects.”

Gilbert adds that the new project will have an opportunity “to do things that we didn’t get to do necessarily so easily in the ’70s,” especially when it comes to casting.

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“They can make an actual point of hiring Native American actors to play the Native Americans, which we didn’t do. We were certainly inclusive and open to it, but it wasn’t a prerequisite,” explains the actress, who’s currently starring in the Off Broadway play Still. “And now they can look at it with a new lens and say, ‘This part should be played by Native American actors.’ I mean, God love the Jewish men who played them on our show. I loved them dearly. I myself, being the Jewish Half-Pint, totally understood it. But bring them in. Bring in Dr. Tann, the actual Black doctor who treated the Ingalls family. Bring all of these people in and tell the story.”

Little House on the Prairie is streaming now on Peacock.