Melissa Gilbert didn’t plan to wade into the online discourse around Netflix’s upcoming Little House on the Prairie remake—until she felt the original series was being mischaracterized.
After Megyn Kelly posted a warning to Netflix not to “wokeify” the project, Gilbert responded publicly, later explaining that the remark “shocked” her because it implied the 1970s show wasn’t already tackling weighty social issues.
Kelly’s post, shared on X in late January 2025, argued that if Netflix “wokeify” the new adaptation, she would make it her mission to “ruin” the project.
Gilbert—who played Laura Ingalls for the full run of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie—replied with an Instagram message urging Kelly to rewatch the original, noting that the series regularly addressed topics like bias, prejudice, gender inequality, and more through frontier-era storytelling.
In a follow-up appearance on The View and in later interviews, Gilbert said her reaction wasn’t about policing a new interpretation—she compared it to the way classics like Little Women are continually reimagined—but about “setting the record straight” about what Little House already was.
She told People that framing inclusion or broader perspectives as inherently “bad” is “damaging,” and emphasized that the original series—guided by Michael Landon—often reflected the social tensions of its own era, just through the lens of the 1870s.
Gilbert has also tried to clarify the stakes for the reboot itself. She’s described Netflix’s project as a “remake, not a reboot,” and said she hopes the new series hews closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books than the NBC version did.
For its part, Netflix has positioned the adaptation as “part family drama, part epic survival tale, and part origin story of the American West,” and Tudum has reported the new version is filming in Canada with a newly announced cast.
