00:01:01.620So those are places where you can go and find me and all of the things that I do.
00:01:07.020I always am afraid to admit that I don't listen to a lot of podcasts, but that is a podcast that I would really, really like to listen to because I admire your work so much.
00:01:16.160I admire Alan's work so much like that.
00:01:18.840And I like hearing about TV, especially when it's not just dudes talking about TV, which is hard to find.
00:01:28.660And it's a fun podcast also because Alan and I have a, I think, a really good Venn diagram of TV taste where there are some things that overlap perfectly and some things that are completely opposite.
00:01:43.960And so sometimes it's just us being like, yes, of course, this is the best thing we've ever seen.
00:01:48.200But then also it's like me attempting to explain what Love Island is to him and him just being deeply, deeply baffled.
00:01:55.860But he then also has this incredible long encyclopedic memory.
00:02:00.500So I'm really looking forward to an upcoming episode where he is going to explain to me something called Mrs. Columbo, which I have no familiarity with, but I'm very excited to learn.
00:02:14.000that sounds like some incredible gen x nonsense yeah uh today we're talking about the netflix
00:02:22.580adaptation of little house on the prairie which came out by the time this episode comes out it
00:02:28.760will have been released about a week and a half two weeks ago it's already doing very well on the
00:02:34.580platform which a lot of premiere seasons do very well on netflix and then drop off and are never
00:02:40.800heard from again but that's another conversation uh we're gonna start by discussing a little bit
00:02:47.720of our little house positionality because katherine does this in her review of the
00:02:54.020series katherine actually was the person who saw screeners and then texted margaret who texted me
00:03:00.300to say uh the new little house is actually pretty good yeah yeah yeah i think it was something like
00:03:06.720The new little house whips was made in the text that I got.
00:03:15.740How could you not be deeply, deeply concerned about the words like there's a new little house on the prairie?
00:03:23.420If you weren't deeply concerned about there being a new little house on the prairie and its quality, you might be disappointed by this one.
00:03:32.760Because its positionality is very interesting.
00:03:35.280But Catherine, what's your relationship with Little House on the Prairie?
00:03:39.640So as I wrote about in the essay that I did for New York Magazine, I grew up having these
00:03:47.720books read out loud to me by my mother.
00:03:51.660It was, it would probably have been 1993, 1994 when she was reading them.
00:03:57.580And she read most of the series out loud to me and to my younger sister.
00:04:04.380And I remember loving them very, very much. I grew up in southwest Michigan, so it was not exactly this area of the country, but it was certainly familiar to me to sort of big rural open spaces and how easy it is to be very, very far away from anything else.
00:04:24.180And I was an American girl, kid also, so there was a lot of overlapping interest in the kind of material culture of the 19th century and rural 19th century places, 100% spoons.
00:04:43.280And so I loved hearing these books get read aloud.
00:04:50.940I was obsessed with, you know, all of their descriptions of digging wells and building doors and how much ribbons cost.
00:04:59.960And my experience was that my mom argued back to these books all the time.
00:05:08.820she was um as fascinated as i was by the descriptions but she was also as she would
00:05:16.180read she would be like why is pa doing this what is he thinking why would they ever be so far from
00:05:21.560town that makes no sense how are they going to survive i remember the descriptions of how pa
00:05:28.700could um encircle ma's waist with his two hands and her being like oh and i was like
00:05:35.620ridiculous diet culture just like yes right there yes and i remember being and corsets i remember
00:05:45.680that was like a long thing about corsets that she went off on and and so my whole i mean it's like a
00:05:53.560obnoxious way of saying this but my experience of these books was dialectical from the beginning
00:05:58.740right yes my mom read them as well although this is like so funny to me my dad popped in and read
00:06:10.040farmer boy oh wow funny yeah i was like did he also read you little men no we did not that was
00:06:20.100like the only book that i think my dad read to me in full like sometimes he would read you know the
00:06:25.040chapters of whatever books we were on but all the responsibility was ceded to my dad
00:06:30.740which is such a weird like people don't talk about it really like there are all these like
00:06:36.820these um canon and non-canon books actually within this larger series like what my mom actually the
00:06:44.580first time I can remember someone saying essentially that something was non-canon is
00:06:49.180her talking about the books that were released posthumously that were um written by laura
00:06:57.380about their life after the fact and my mom's like it doesn't really fit she didn't really
00:07:02.780you don't know if she wanted it to be published it's not really up to the same quality you
00:07:07.280shouldn't read it um i don't remember her as many interjections from her but she was so
00:07:14.340so into interjections like she made me watch mtv with her that was the only way i could watch mtv
00:07:20.800and i have like such a vivid memory of watching counting crows video for mr jones and they have
00:07:27.220like a flamenco girl in the back because there's that that lyric and my mom's like do you see what
00:07:32.400they're doing that's objectifying or like with little mermaid she's like why do you think she0.99
00:07:38.880loses her voice so i actually i i'll have to have a discussion with her about whether she did this
00:07:48.740but i do love this the way that the books to kids just feel like oh my gosh they're having so much
00:07:54.660fun and if you revisit them as adults you're like pa was a dilettante like like he could not