The Little House on the Prairie cast is revealing why fans shouldn’t expect a reboot anytime in the near future.
Several of the beloved show’s stars, including Karen Grassle, Alison Arngrim, Melissa Sue Anderson, Matthew Labyorteaux, Leslie Landon and Wendi Lou Lee reunited at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival last weekend to celebrate Little House‘s upcoming 50th anniversary in September.
Though The Hollywood Reporter reported in 2020 that a reboot of the series, which ran for nine seasons from 1974 to 1983, was in development at Paramount TV Studios and Anonymous Content, the cast shared at a Saturday panel that nothing was currently in the works — and likely won’t ever be.
“There have been lots of attempts to do a Little House on the Prairie again,” Grassle, who played Caroline, the matriarch of the Ingalls family, told People Magazine. “There have been shows, there have been a musical, and I think we had a unique experience and it can’t be repeated.”
She added of her onscreen husband, Charles Ingalls (Michael Landon), who also served as an executive producer and writer for the show, “Michael was a genius at casting and writing. He understood things about how to translate that material into television for the public that was beyond what most writers understand. And he had his thumb on the pulse of the public and understood what people were longing for, and you don’t find that every day.”
“And then the fact that we were all so perfectly cast was a kind of genius,” Grassle continued of her fellow Little House castmembers.
Anderson, who starred as eldest daughter Mary Ingalls, also noted that she doesn’t think a reboot would work today because Landon, who died in 1991, wouldn’t be a part of it.
“Little House works on television because of him,” she said.
However, Arngrim, who played Harriet Oleson’s (Katherine MacGregor) daughter Nellie, later quipped that if a reboot ever did come to fruition, she already knows who she would want to play: her onscreen mother.
“I always joke that if they do redo the entire thing, I am ready to play Mrs. Oleson,” she said. “Absolutely, I’m down for that.”
Little House on the Prairie, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel, followed the life and adventures of the Ingalls family in the nineteenth-century American Midwest.
