Four people, two adults and two children, sitting and smiling indoors with a sepia-toned prairie and covered wagon backdrop, reading or looking at a book. Text reads: Little House on the Prairie Book or Script?

Book to Screen

How Faithful Is Little House on the Prairie to the Books? The Ingalls Decide

Name: Little House on the Prairie: Cast Puts the Show's Faithfulness to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Books to the Test
Uploaded: 2026-07-09T07:00:00.000Z
Duration: 3 min 48 s
Description: Alice Halsey, Luke Bracey, Crosby Fitzgerald, and Skywalker Hughes test their own knowledge — and the show's faithfulness — to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books. Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix

Just how faithful is Little House on the Prairie to Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved books? In the video above, stars Alice Halsey (Laura), Luke Bracey (Charles, or Pa), Crosby Fitzgerald (Caroline, or Ma), and Skywalker Hughes (Mary) sit down together family-style to find out — for real.

The cast plays a game built entirely from the source material: Descriptions of the prairie, the Ingalls' cabin, a barn dance, and a haunting song on the wind are all read aloud, and they must decide together whether each line comes from Wilder's original 1935 novel or from showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine's script. Along the way, they open up about the year Sonnenshine's team spent researching frontier life to get every detail right, what struck them first about Wilder's plainspoken, vivid voice, and why staying true to the books mattered so much as they filmed Season 1. Little House on the Prairie is now streaming.

7:00 am

Video

Transcript

Right when I got the audition, I read the whole series. And I had read the series a million times. Voracious readers.

We are great readers.

The two of us, like, yes.

[producer] OK, now we're gonna play a little game.

[girls] Ooh! [laughing] "Pa and Mr. Edwards nailed thin slabs against the cut ends of the logs…"

[continues reading]

[Skywalker] I'm gonna say book, because it's from Laura's eyes… I remember "it was a nice house." I remember reading that in the book. Okay, we all say book?

[chime rings]

[all cheering] Yes. In the books, the imagery, oh my goodness. The descriptions of all of the houses, and the trees, and just everything around her, the way she described it, was so beautiful and captivating. Next. Read it. "Pa plays the fiddle. Edwards plays the harmonica."

[continues reading]

[Skywalker] Book.

[Luke] That's from a script.

[Crosby] Script, because

Not as descriptive. No, yeah. In the book, Edwards doesn't play the harmonica.

He just dances, right?

[Crosby] I think script. We're going to say script.

[chime rings]

[all cheering]

[crowd cheering] Just from my point of view, the scripts are absolutely beautiful. They put so much of their hearts and their souls into them. It's amazing. I think that we are very, very grateful to Rebecca and all of the writers, really. Everybody who tried to make this show possible, everybody worked so hard. And I think that it really shows.

"It was something like a song, but not like any song that Laura had ever heard."

[continues reading] I did this scene.

Well, because it's more past tense.

Book. Yeah, and it's got, like, the words "fierce" and stuff in it. The cadence, where she's like, "It was something like…" [rhythmic tones]

[Crosby and Luke] Yeah. Also the adjective, like, calling a sound angry or not angry… It's beautiful. That's got to be the book. Are we going book?

[chime rings]

[all cheering] She manages to just pull you in, just, like, in the first sentence. You can really see why her stories are beloved to so many people over generations. "Laura looked around the cabin, realized she's the only one still standing."

[continues reading] That's script.

I think that's going to be Episode 4.

Script. Yeah, that's Episode 4.

[chime rings]

[all cheering] That means we're home. Yes, now we're home… safe and sound.

Yeah, showing the story versus telling the story. You know, Laura Ingalls Wilder was, like, painting the full picture, which is why people love the books. Because as you read, you're seeing colors and imagery. And then Rebecca was able to sort of turn that on its head and show it. Yeah.

[Luke] There's no words to waste in a script. Page count and word count is kind of everything. So you can't be as-- as descriptive and use words like "fierce sound" and "angry noise." I think you have to be a bit more direct and to the point so that everyone from every department who's making the show knows what's going on.

[Alice] Rebecca is an amazing writer. Put next to Laura's writing, both of them are so descriptive and so captivating. Um, I think that it really shows her skills. I think you can see the difference between it looking through Laura's eyes and looking through the eyes of, like, the Little House, you know? I think it was a tie.

[girls] Thanks, Tudum… [laughing] …for having us. Go watch the show on Netflix.

[all] Bye.