Netflix confirmed this week that it's adapting one heck of a popular franchise – a series of books, in fact, that's sold millions upon millions of copies. While that might make you assume, in 2026, that it's some romantasy fare or BookTok craze that'll be coming to streaming, the truth is far more innocent.
This week we got a trailer for Little House on the Prairie, a classic of young American literature, and it looks like it'll unsurprisingly aim to preserve the innocent and simple tone and content of the source novels. Generations of Americans grew up with these books, so the show might have quite a lot to live up to when it arrives on 9 July.
If you pay a lot of attention to how Netflix trails its shows (and I do), then the fact that we're getting this teaser a good few months before the show starts is a good indicator that Netflix hopes it'll do big numbers when it does drop. Why not, after all? It's got huge brand recognition and the potential to be a whole-family sort of show, rather than one aimed at particular demographics.
The show, like the books, will tell the story of the Ingall family as they make a seismic move to Minnesota to live on the great plains, in that titular little cottage. Set in the 1870s to start with, it portrays an evocative and much mythologised period in US history, but does so with a reputation for simple stories and an aversion to overly dramatic moments.
It's a little bit like Little Women in that way, and if it can get half the adulation that greeted Greta Gerwig's version of that story a few year ago, it'll be one of the best-received shows of the year basically by default. This isn't the first time Little House on the Prairie has been converted for TV, either, with a long-running show from the 1970s and 80s running to some 200 episodes before it ended.
Netflix's executives will doubtless be daydreaming of a similarly beloved run, but first it'll have to stick the initial landing, so we'll see how it fares when it starts streaming in July.
