00:09:18.540Charlie took his first steps in that cabin.
00:09:20.360And you just realize that we think, and certainly the show and the books projected and promoted the idea of innocent.
00:09:30.820You know, you never in the books, no one ever goes to the bathroom in the books.
00:09:34.120And in the show, the rare times they show the outhouse, it sort of played for last, particularly with Willie.
00:09:39.620but like the reality of how awful it was but also like that laura and mary and carrie and grace or
00:09:52.720any child living in that environment would have no illusions over their parents sex lives you know
00:09:58.900or how children were made or came into this world yeah or the noises or smells that come around it
00:10:06.960or you know birthing the whole thing like just the exposure to the realities the very very brutal
00:10:12.720realities of life they were so pushed up against constantly and so this this sort of illusion of
00:10:21.140innocence and fantasy is so much excuse me is so misplaced um and certainly the books
00:10:26.800i mean we spoke a lot about this on wilder how the books um when you sort of understand more
00:10:32.900about laura's actual life uh felt like a sort of extended theory session she was giving to herself
00:10:40.680over her childhood and oh yeah and in that light the the fan more fantastical elements of it or
00:10:48.680the the sweeter more cozy elements of it certainly make more sense but you do that road trip and
00:10:55.340you're just like standing beside a creek inside of like a little indent thinking this dugout i
00:11:02.640fantasized about at age eight. This is really deeply unappealing. This is very deeply unappealing.
00:11:09.440I can't believe people lived like this 150 years ago. It's not that long ago. This is awful. Thank
00:11:14.200God for running water and vaccine. Yeah. Thank God for it all. Thank God for it all. Well, I think
00:11:21.320that the new adaptation is going to going to dig into some of that, but we're going to find out.
00:11:25.580We're going to find out. We're going to be talking about it. We'll have Joy on again and both of us
00:11:29.580talk to her along with uh the woman who wrote the series and hopefully some of the cast members
00:11:34.920of the old series and the new series so we're going to be bringing it audio can i just say
00:11:40.020just listening to you describe that how many women were involved in bringing this to the screen
00:11:45.300is really encouraging you know what i mean like it's really wonderful and such a listen i have
00:11:53.100no shade to michael landon i am a michael landon stan i don't seems the most charming person on
00:11:58.460screen but that so handsome that show charming was so fully envisioned and produced by men
00:12:10.300whereas the books you know were laura and rose and their editor um whose name escapes me but was
00:12:16.500a very very famous children's editor was a woman and so i like this idea of women being the people
00:12:24.240behind this new updated version. And I'm very interested to see how that manifests on the
00:12:31.840screen. And we will. So with that, here's my conversation with Joy.
00:12:45.840Hey, Joy, how you doing? Hi, Jo. Thanks for having me. Oh, my God. I mean, the problem is
00:12:52.980that I could talk to you for 19 and a half hours and yet we don't have that much time,
00:12:58.480but I might have to have you back on once the show actually releases. I mean, there's so many
00:13:06.240reasons that I'm having you on today, but one of them, the biggest one is that you are a producer
00:13:12.140on the new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie. Yes. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. And
00:13:20.660This is a project, obviously, that you know is near and dear to my heart, given the Wilder podcast, but it's also something that is so close to you and that has been in the works for such a long time. You guys acquired the rights to this in the middle of the pandemic, right?
00:13:38.540Yes. Yes. In 2020. And I actually initially had chased the rights down in like 2018. I had heard that they might be coming up. And then I heard again in 2020 that they were coming up.
00:13:53.000And and I finally got to meet Trip Friendly, who controls the underlying rights in 2020 and and wooed him and tricked him into letting me be his partner on this and putting putting this together in a whole new way.
00:14:11.020Yeah, because, and we, you know, if you're a fan of the Wilder podcast, if you've listened to the past episode.
00:14:36.020How did you convince Tripp that it was time to make this show?
00:14:40.140Well, you know, I think he I think Tripp felt it was time and he was meeting a lot of different producers, you know, and in our first meeting, what we talked about was, you know, his father, Tripp's father, for our listeners, Tripp's father originated the Michael Landon series and sort of gave it over to Michael Landon in a way.
00:15:06.720And Michael Landon really created an incredible piece of pop culture that is inspired by the books, but really is much more Pa's, you know, Pa's story, where Pa is this incredible hero and the center of it.
00:15:23.540And Tripp, I think, really felt that it was time to tell the story from Laura's point of view, which is exactly what I had dreamed of and wanted to do is like, you know, why, why would this, you know, incredibly important piece of literature, this book series that was written and created by a woman, a 60 plus woman, by the way.
00:15:51.620When she wrote these books, Laura Ingalls Wilder was in her 60s when she wrote these books, which is a fact that I think we brought up again and again in the Wilder podcast because we were just blown away by that fact.
00:16:05.460And so just there's so many layers of inspiration to what Laura did and what these books have done being out in the culture for 100 years and how differently they've been interpreted by so many people.
00:16:19.580And when I sat down with Trip for the first time, there were a few things that we really agreed on. One is there aren't enough father-daughter stories in the culture, you know, and there really wasn't, you know, during the pandemic, it was really apparent.
00:16:36.920there just wasn't a lot to watch at home for parents and kids to watch together. I feel that
00:16:43.560Hollywood had kind of, like, been abandoning young protagonists and the kind of movies that
00:16:50.040we grew up on with Stand By Me and E.T. and Goonies, you know. I watched The Sandlot last
00:16:57.500night. Oh, my God. Such a good one. I know. I know. Yeah. And we're going to do Stand By Me
00:17:02.660tonight but then we're also going to start watching the series together oh my god i can't wait um but
00:17:09.720but my my friend dana fox and i had been making a show with john m chu uh and like the team who
00:17:16.700ultimately became the wicked team called home before dark on apple and that had just come out
00:17:22.520and trip had watched that show and really loved it and loved that it was based on it was based on
00:17:30.940a real child who was 10 years old and a journalist. And, um, and we were very true to that child's
00:17:37.780voice. And, um, and Tripp saw the comparisons between Laura and Pa and Matt and Hilde in our
00:17:48.720show. So I think that was, that was one piece that was sort of a big help that Tripp knew that
00:17:54.440we would approach it differently. And then, you know, I said to him, you know, obviously we were
00:17:59.920It was the summer of 2020, the first time I met him. And I said, it's really important to me to tell a more 360 view of what was happening in the American West. And I think that we could be courageous about it because we're telling it through the eyes of a child, you know.
00:18:23.580But when I went back to read the books, which, like anything in 1932, are racist and problematic, you know, like and and reading them to my daughter, who was eight at the time and trying to decide how to read them to her.
00:18:42.360Right. Because when you hit on the more problematic parts of the text, you don't want to censor that.
00:18:51.360You want to explain to the child where that's coming from.
00:18:56.060And so what really was my North Star when I read when I reread the books was that in Little House on the Prairie book, the third book, she says, and I'm going to botch the quote, guys, because it's not in front of me right now.
00:19:11.620But she says, if we didn't want to know them, you know, if we didn't want to know the Indians, why did we come here?
00:19:21.360And so if an eight-year-old could say that to her parents, and if a 65-year-old woman could write that she said that to her parents,
00:19:31.940then the core of these books was good and that there was an adaptation ready to be made for this time and, you know, for this moment in history.
00:19:45.080And I also asked Trip, you know, how do you feel about deeply researching and including the Osage side of the story? And could we have perhaps like a little girl who's Osage or, you know, a mixed family, you know, and he said that had always been his dream to be able to tell the Osage side of the story.
00:20:11.060And so he was very much in support of that. And so as producers, Trip and Dana and I really started to look at how we could approach this even before we found Rebecca Sunenshine, who was the perfect person to actually adapt these books and and create the show.
00:20:32.040And, you know, I started with Dr. Robert Warrior, who was like the leading Osage scholar at University of Kansas.
00:20:40.060And and, you know, over the years, we just did a lot of deep research and talked to a ton of different consultants.
00:20:49.800There was an Osage writer named Carter Christensen in our room who really contributed to that story just from her own family history.
00:20:58.420And so we knew that in order to make a new Little House on the Prairie, we didn't want to compete with the absolutely beautiful piece of popular culture that Michael Landon created and that ran 222 episodes or however long it ran because that is not, you know, that's just not how TV is made today.
00:21:23.420But we wanted to do something that no previous adaptation had tried, which is fill in the blanks that Laura's books couldn't have possibly, you know, told.
00:21:48.000I mean, and even though she had perspective, she was writing, you know, she was writing during the Depression, right?
00:21:54.780In 32, she started writing these books and was, you know, using these stories to inspire people to say, you can live in poverty.
00:22:05.560You can survive on love and community.
00:22:08.880You can believe in your family and your siblings and your parents, and you can get through the worst of things.
00:22:16.540But she was looking like we all do, you know, at our childhood. She was looking at her childhood through rose-colored glasses, you know, in order to try to inspire an audience of kids and families. You know, the books were written for children.
00:22:32.240And when I was reading Prairie Fires, which is really sort of the holy grail of all Laura Ingalls Wilder history in my book, and I know you and Glynnis agree, Laura had said, I told the truth, but I didn't tell the whole truth.
00:22:53.740And to me, that was the North Star. Like, in going out to find the writer that could create this show, that was, to me, just opened up the aperture and allowed us to fill in the blanks where Laura couldn't have possibly when she was writing books in 1932.
00:23:14.820Is how can we, you know, come up with a fictionalized yet historically relevant and somewhat accurate, you know, fictional series.
00:23:30.160And so it really takes a village and a lot of obsessed Little House fans to come together and make a show like this.
00:26:40.860And could we make simplicity and living on the land and could we make that cool?
00:26:49.700You know, could we make that something that's attractive?
00:26:52.020And, you know, I really felt like that was sort of the upside of the pandemic, right, was that a lot of us got to just be together in our houses with our families.
00:27:02.920And we were trying to learn to bake bread and compost and have a garden.
00:27:09.980And if you're me, you failed at those things.
00:27:13.400But I did figure out how to get them both a little house on the prairie.
00:27:17.380So, you know, I did the, like, Halloween.
00:27:20.960Yeah. But I think that we're in a time where there's a lot of misinformation coming at everyone.
00:27:30.920And when I was looking at all of this material and realized that post-Civil War, flyers were all over the country saying free land in the West, you know, flyers were in Norway, such free land in the West.
00:27:50.600People were being recruited to come and build a town on occupied land where Native Americans lived.
00:28:00.480And were they bad people for believing this advertisement that there was free land?
00:28:12.180And so we wanted to tell a story where everyone is flawed. Everyone is trying to survive. Everyone is poor, really.
00:28:28.900You know, they are either getting their land taken away or they've been spit out by the Civil War or, you know, everyone is in search of something and they all have good intentions and they all have children to protect.
00:28:47.160Right. And so what would it look like if we brought all those people together in Independence, Kansas?
00:28:53.940And we were pretty true to the Little House on the Prairie book in terms of Dr. Tan is their doctor. He was in that book. He was a really memorable character.
00:29:08.560And can you explain who Dr. Tan is to people who may not have read it? Because we talk a lot about him in Wilder.
00:29:15.220Yes. Dr. Tan was a Black doctor who cared for both white settlers and the Osages who lived in Independence, Kansas. And so, you know, that was pretty progressive for the time.
00:29:31.400Even reading that in a book in 1932 was probably pretty progressive. And so that was another just exciting person in history that we wanted to highlight and make an important part of the series.
00:29:48.600You know, and I think, you know, I don't think Laura had access to truly understanding what was going on with, you know, with the land deal between the Osages and the U.S. government.
00:30:06.280But our writers room did a ton of research around that so that we could and we also brought in a lot of Osage experts to help us with it.
00:30:21.340And we did our best representation of what really might have been happening in that time in terms of when you read the book, Laura has a memory of, you know, of what it was like, but she's not using specific people or words that, you know, she didn't know.
00:30:46.400We have the benefit of 100 years of history to have done that research and kind of filled in the blanks in our own way.
00:30:55.400Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. I mean, there's a lot of issues in the Little House books and even in the Little House series, the original series as well.
00:31:06.840But we also, I think what we have to remember is that we have so much more information now and that we have the ability to fill in these gaps.
00:31:15.520And so it would be a disservice to the narrative to not fill them in and then to not have a conversation about the original text and why they didn't have that knowledge.
00:31:28.380Because I don't think that the individual men who are seeing these signs, these poor, and they're impoverished, mostly living in poverty, saw these signs and they're like, oh, they told me there's free land out there.
00:31:41.620I don't think that they're necessarily all of them going there as occupiers. But I think, you know, the blame is heaped on the government here that pushed those men. And so I think seeing seeing it in shades of gray is so important for the way that we look back on history these days.
00:32:01.280And for the way that we look at each other now, you know, I mean, it is so easy when we live in our phones to just read awful comments, to write awful comments, to look at 30 seconds of a clip of something and decide and judge someone who's from a different part of the country or a different part of the world.
00:32:27.480And it's an epidemic. Like, hatred is an epidemic. And we kind of thought that, like, sure, is our independence Kansas a little bit more utopian than it probably was in 1869? Of course it is.
00:32:45.040But so were Laura's books because we are trying to make a truthful yet hopeful story that families can watch together that will open up a conversation about history and about complicated, you know,
00:33:04.740complicated characters who are dealing with class and race and ownership and survival.
00:33:14.420And how could we do that in a way that families from age 8 to 80 would want to sit in front of
00:33:21.940the television and watch this together, but not have it be sort of a guilty pleasure that it's
00:33:28.460just made for kids and it's dumbed down you know um and that's not an easy tone to strike but i
00:33:36.260think we did i think we did it i'm i can't wait for you to see it i'm gonna start tonight i'm
00:33:43.200gonna start tonight um and i will say that we are recording this before the show comes out and
00:33:52.160releasing it the week the show releases uh and so hopefully everyone in the audience is gonna
00:33:58.220watch along with us and we can talk about it on the over the influence sub stack. And, you know,
00:34:04.360I'd love to have you back when a lot when a lot more people have watched it, too. So we can have
00:34:09.280a really vibrant conversation. I can actually solicit questions from the audience. I think
00:34:15.980that'd be a lot of fun. Right. And I can't wait for you to meet Rebecca Sun and Shine because
00:34:20.420like just being the person who really she was the person like who had to write this show and it was
00:34:30.620it's I'm excited for you to meet her and talk to her because it was not easy to find the person
00:34:39.740who could courageously face the history of these books and this woman head on you know and just had
00:34:48.840such deep love for it, where she could build a new version of this world, you know, and I'm
00:34:58.620excited for you to hear her perspective on it, too. Yeah, no, I can't. I really, really can't
00:35:03.540wait to talk to her. What were you looking for in a writer? And was that difficult to find when
00:35:12.360you first set out to do it it was the first and foremost every single time i spoke to an agent
00:35:20.000or a writer i you had to be obsessed with these books um it couldn't be a job for anyone like we
00:35:31.420weren't meeting anyone who was not obsessed with these books and um there was also you know with a
00:35:40.460big piece of IP like this, you need somebody who actually will be available and make it their
00:35:46.000priority because there's a lot of stakeholders in it. But ultimately, it was the courage
00:35:53.160to look at our history, not with shame and fear, but with a healthy interrogation,
00:36:06.000you know um and the ability to build a world where nobody was all wrong and nobody was all right
00:36:16.760pa was a man who was very flawed who had a beautiful heart and he was a poet and an artist
00:36:23.760and he made a lot of mistakes as a farmer as a businessman you know and to us it felt like
00:36:33.740you know that is a man that more men are going to relate to than the perfect pa who saves every
00:36:41.660single person in every episode of television like and that was another thing that had hit me when I
00:36:49.080was watching the old show with my daughter who was eight at the time and she was loving it and
00:36:54.320then by like episode 10 she said why is pa always saving everybody yes yes and you know
00:37:03.440this is you know were you able were you able to say because michael landon created the show
00:37:08.700i was like i was like have you seen how hot he is i know like you've seen him with you've seen
00:37:14.880his abs you've seen him crying with his shirt off right i mean he has like no tan lines none and
00:37:21.540he's a farmer yeah um no it was really interesting to to hear that perspective because i knew that
00:37:28.800we needed to find a writer who understood these characters as historical figures, as deep complex
00:37:37.640characters, but also could respect that there are millions and millions and millions of people who
00:37:45.960are obsessed with the Michael Landon show. And we do not want to alienate them. We want to invite
00:37:52.100them, you know, to a new look at these books and at these, at the Ingalls family who lived
00:38:01.080in history, you know, and that took a courageous writer.
00:38:05.240And the thing I think that was so interesting about Rebecca is she's mostly written horror
00:38:10.160and genre, you know, and so she wasn't the obvious choice for this material.
00:38:17.240and you really had to look at her horror and genre work on the boys and on archive 81 and
00:38:25.460vampire diaries and see that she had really deep character work inside those those um those
00:38:35.380projects and then meeting her just knowing that the books were in her bones the books made her a
00:38:42.420writer um it was the combination of those things that we realized she could create a world
00:38:50.840and have sort of enough distance and perspective because we were all living we are all living in a
00:38:58.820lot of guilt all the time right about about our history all the time all the time like we know
00:39:07.760as you know progressive white women we're we're feeling terrible about everything all the time
00:39:15.980beautiful girl when i would play you 51 of the country doesn't feel terrible terrible all the
00:39:20.460time well exactly and we wanted to make something for for everyone we don't want it to be i think
00:39:28.360that's so important a hundred yes because i mean it needs to be the tents i say this all the time
00:39:34.260the tent needs to be bigger, not smaller. Yes. And you just need to see the humanity. I mean,
00:39:40.400Mr. Edwards was a Civil War veteran from Tennessee, you know? And, like, we were trying
00:39:52.180to show the humanity of every kind of person who might have been able to come together in
00:40:00.620Independence, Kansas in 1869. And we looked at the census so that it made sense that these people
00:40:08.860could have existed, you know. And Rebecca had sort of the courage to look at it with that
00:40:17.020bit of distance like she does when she builds, you know, a world that's science fiction,
00:40:23.340you know. And I think that that was helpful. Yeah, I really couldn't agree more. And I
00:40:29.560try to write my books for everyone as well, you know, despite the fact that I'm a raging
00:40:35.520progressive feminist. And yet I want to bring people into these stories. I want all people to
00:40:43.080feel comfortable reading, all women really, to feel comfortable reading them, sharing them with
00:40:48.660friends and also, you know, giving them something to chew on that they might not have thought about
00:40:55.540before had they not felt invited to see this kind of content no exactly and we just felt like
00:41:04.420there was a way to sort of trojan horse outreach and unity inside this property you know um
00:41:16.640and and bridge a gap that is that is that's a feeling like a really wide chasm in not only
00:41:25.280our country but in the world you know and um and obviously just to be able to create conversation
00:41:33.020you know where people who are really different and people who are feeling robbed and have every right
00:41:40.200to feel robbed um can reach out and talk to each other and find solutions you know um and so that's
00:41:50.120what you try to do with this show yeah yeah and I think that's what we need so much more of and
00:41:56.840you also tried to do so much more and you did so much more with this show and one of the things
00:42:01.940that I love and this is what I want to talk about after we have one last break is that the original
00:42:08.100series the original television series and I'm apologizing to anyone who can hear my three-year-old
00:42:12.880wailing outside but you know this is the realities of this is the reality of American summer of
00:42:19.640american summer um she's fine i promise she's perfectly fine she just wants a lemonade and0.98
00:42:24.820someone will give it to her but not me uh so cute she's cute she's cute and she's a menace to society
00:42:30.200but you know the original show was so much the michael landon project he was the star he was the
00:42:39.660creator he was like it was just it was all pa all the time and the books were very focused on laura
00:42:46.420And your new show, we are looking at things much more from Laura's perspective.
00:42:53.960And I want to dig into that after our last break.
00:44:00.920So how did you, how did you and the writers and the directors, how did you approach bringing Laura much more into the center of this show?
00:44:14.240Well, I mean, really from minute one, before our first meetings with writers, and that was always the goal. You know, these were Laura's books. These were her autobiographical books. They were told from her perspective. We were adapting the books. We were not rebooting the TV series.
00:44:35.540and that was very much Tripp's intention you know in bringing the rights back out
00:44:42.460was that you know was to do it differently this time and I think he's I call him pa like that's
00:44:48.840our joke you know and he has a daughter named Rebecca who he's very close with and um and you
00:44:55.320know he very much intentionally chose women who were courageous and bold about how we were going
00:45:03.640to tell the story and who are, you know, nerdy and do lots of do lots of research. And and I think
00:45:13.800that like having the support of the rights holder to really do this from Laura's perspective was
00:45:20.480the first step. And it just made the most sense because also staying in the perspective of the
00:45:31.140child who is witnessing what's happening in the world allows you to come from this sort of place
00:45:41.020of innocence she's not the one choosing to squat on osage land you know and if you and she just
00:45:49.800wants to know the indians she just wants to befriend the osages and learn about their culture
00:45:57.060She's innocent. And our children are innocent. You know, our children don't choose the wars that they're born into or the, you know, land battles or the financial problems that they're that they're born into.
00:46:15.360And so actually telling the story from Laura's perspective gave us a lot of freedom as storytellers to, you know, to sort of let all the characters be human rather than some kind of representation of a political position.
00:46:38.280Exactly. And I do think, I really do think that, you know, by setting something from the perspective of a young girl, it's a lot easier. And this is why I think the books work in so many ways. Despite being problematic and hard to read from a perspective these days, they're still a goddamn delight, okay?
00:47:00.500And I think it's because they're through the lens, I mean, it's an older woman writing as her younger self, but when you're centering a young woman in the story, there is so much more curiosity.
00:47:13.320There's so much more joy and I think empathy as well.0.70
00:47:19.500And I also think there was a lot of empathy on the part of Ma in the book as well, and yet it was hard for her to express it because I think that Ma was also in reality fucking terrified all of the time because she's following her husband around on these ridiculous ventures of which he's never any good at.
00:47:41.320He's like, he is not good at any of these things that he thinks he's going to make so much money on. She's got all of these babies. They're being carted all over the country. Their lives are being completely overturned at every juncture.
00:47:57.700And also, you know, she didn't have the knowledge of the Native Americans that we have now.
00:48:06.080And she was afraid for herself and her family.
00:48:09.820And so I think that comes across in the books.
00:48:12.440But then Ma also comes across as a bigot because of her fear.
00:48:17.460But I think, you know, being able to see Laura seeing her mother is just going to be so interesting to watch.
00:48:25.560Well, I think you'll be pleased at how we handled that because we did not hide that Caroline is very afraid. She's coming from, you know, having witnessed war in Wisconsin.
00:48:41.220She, you know, racism comes from fear. You know, a lot of hatred comes from a place of fear. And so we try to give every character, we try to show a truthful portrait of how someone might feel coming from where they're coming from in the story.
00:49:06.880whether it's having fought in the Civil War or, you know, living somewhere where there was
00:49:15.440any kind of battle. And then we try to see them grow. And what do they learn
00:49:23.080from this new experience in the town of Independence, you know? And so I'm excited
00:49:29.100for you to to to see our caroline because she's still a woman who is completely in love and1.00
00:49:37.280obsessed with her husband and will follow him to the ends of the earth but she doesn't do it0.74
00:49:41.580without questioning their decisions and she has a lot of agency and she is very smart you know
00:49:49.220caroline was a teacher and um education is very important to her uh you know you can't be a dummy
00:50:25.460Well, I bring that up a lot when we talk about trad wife culture and, you know, all of the false nostalgia surrounding the back to the land movement.0.82
00:50:36.380And, oh, don't you just so you just want to be like Ma Ingalls.0.98
00:50:40.380And number one, oh, my God, I think Ma Ingalls would trade her life for our life in a freaking heartbeat.1.00
00:50:46.020OK, she didn't want to live in in the dirt hole on the side of the creek.1.00
00:50:49.100Okay. But number two, she in real life also had to have so much agency and be so smart
00:50:57.800because she was managing that entire family. Yes.0.92
00:51:02.960And so what the trad wife narrative leaves out with its idea of like submissiveness to your
00:51:08.580husband is that I don't think those women were submissive at all. Sure. They often had to follow
00:51:14.600their husbands, but they were also a helpmate, okay? They were co-working together to manage
00:51:21.100a family during incredibly dangerous times. And I do not think that, you know, many of the trad
00:51:28.020wife narratives, and including, you know, a recent book about trad wives, did enough research on what
00:51:35.900women's role actually was back then. I mean, these women were helping their husbands build these
00:51:42.840houses. These women were doing very hard labor. You know, you didn't have, there were, when they1.00
00:51:48.800got to independence, there were only a hundred people in that town. So how many people could
00:51:53.800help you build a house? You know, I mean, the women were working, like they were working in1.00
00:52:01.160the fields. They were working on the prairie. There was, you didn't have a choice. Everybody0.99
00:52:07.560had to pitch in to survive and um as much as i would love to put ma in you know high couture1.00
00:52:18.660and have her bake chocolate make chocolate chips from scratch with nara uh what's her face the
00:52:25.260but nara smith also i mean i say this all the time i'm like um let's be honest the age of the
00:52:31.860trad wife is actually over now because nara smith and hannah nilliman have both said they're the
00:52:36.240CEOs of their company like it's it's done it's done we reached peak trad way obviously it's like
00:52:43.000if anybody was believing that these girls weren't making millions of dollars and running a gigantic0.98
00:52:47.860business making those cookies they were crazy I mean they're geniuses geniuses geniuses geniuses0.99
00:52:55.660that's what they are yep yep exactly exactly hit it right on the head but yeah I'm so excited too
00:53:01.980Because I think about Ma Ingalls a lot.
00:53:23.580And I think it's also so interesting how, you know, Rebecca and I talk about this often,
00:53:29.360that, like, she was a girl living on a farm in Northern California who was fishing and lived like
00:53:36.920Laura Ingalls. I was, you know, right outside New York City and Yonkers and, like, a working-class
00:53:44.160Italian-Irish kid who, like, barely saw a tree. And that's why I loved Laura Ingalls. Do you know
00:53:50.980what I mean? It was so glamorous to me. It was so foreign to me to, like, be able to live in nature.
00:53:58.320Like, you would go to Central Park or, you know, Tibbetts Park and Yonkers, like, to be in nature, you know? And I think that, like, we all had this different obsession with Laura Ingalls, and she spoke to us, you know, all for different reasons.
00:54:18.080But to me, she was like the first feminist girl.
00:54:24.620She was like a girl with, you know, undiagnosed ADHD who got in trouble all the time for standing up for what's right.
00:54:35.720I saw myself in this little girl from 1869 who wasn't afraid to say things that weren't popular, you know.
00:54:45.120And I think that Laura spoke to a lot of us, especially Gen X women, you know, because I think she was saying things that we weren't allowed to say yet.
00:54:57.120Yeah, absolutely. And so many of us across the political spectrum. And that is what Glynis and I realized when we hit the road for Wilder because we were driving through red states and blue states and blue parts of red states and red state red parts of blue states.
00:55:11.980And we talked to everyone. We talked to every socioeconomic level. We talked to every different race, ages, political affiliations. And people related to Laura for so many similar reasons, despite, you know, despite their differences today.
00:55:33.600And, you know, I think that's a beautiful thing to capture. And that's also why I think Laura can bring more people together in a beautiful way. And that's what I'm really hoping for this show. I'm sick of the division. I'm so exhausted by it. And I'm sick of us not being able to have real conversations with someone who disagrees with us.
00:55:54.760And if Little House on the Prairie can be the thing that I go talk to my neighbors with their big old Trump sign on their house about, cool.0.98
00:56:03.120Because that shit has to start happening or we're just going to keep going in the wrong direction.0.73
00:56:07.800No, I mean, that really is the dream, you know, like that really is why I chased these books and wanted to make a new version of this show.0.99
00:56:17.380I mean, my husband, I'm from, I'm a New Yorker, but my husband is from North Dakota from a family of farmers and his first job was corn detasseling.
00:56:26.600And so to have my in-laws so proud that, you know, the New York Hollywood daughter-in-law is making one last time early, you know what I'm saying, is just like in my own family, it feels unifying, you know, just that we have this thing in common that we all love Laura Ingalls when we came from completely different worlds.
00:56:53.100And I mean, that is the gift that she left behind with these books, you know, and and and I think it's up to all of us women who grew up and saw ourselves in her to sort of, you know, straighten out the story a little bit, too.
00:57:10.380Right. And like help people understand all the facets of what these books and the Ingalls represent in American history and not just the original television series or not just the children's books.
00:57:26.540But, you know, Prairie Fires, Pioneer Girl, all the incredible research that Pamela Smith-Hill and Caroline Fraser and you ladies, you and Glynnis, have done around Laura.
00:57:42.220Like, she really is, you know, truly a pioneer.