• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 10 hours ago

From “Little Singles” to “Little House on the Prairie,” it has been a big week for the TV Blog.

“Little Singles” is a run-of-the-mill reality series coming to TLC that is like all the rest, except that its five participants happen to be dwarves.

“Little House on the Prairie,” however, is anything but run-of-the-mill.

Dropping on Netflix on Thursday with all eight episodes, “Little House” could be the most attractive new series of the year.

The series is not intended to be a 21st-century update or “reimagining” of the old “Little House on the Prairie” series that ran for nine seasons on NBC 50 years ago.

The new one is billed as an adaptation of the Little House series of novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her upbringing in the Midwest starting in the 1870s. 

Eight of the novels were published in the author’s lifetime. The first one was Little House in the Big Woods published in 1932.

The novel with the most famous title, Little House on the Prairie, was the third in the series.

The TV show opens with the Ingalls family -- Laura (played by 11-year-old Alice Halsey), older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and parents Charles Ingalls (Luke Bracey) and Caroline Ingalls (Crosby Fitzgerald) -- undertaking an arduous journey by covered wagon from Wisconsin, where they lived in civilized surroundings, to the edge of the frontier in western Kansas.

Their destination: Independence, Kansas (not the same Independence as the one in Missouri where Harry Truman lived for most of his life).

The town in “Little House” is little more than a dirt street with businesses on either side, but as yet has no schoolhouse or church.

Charles has brought the family in the hopes of staking a claim to homestead land. Once situated, the family starts building a home and getting to know the local residents.

This show is a pleasure to watch, starting with the way it looks. It is beautifully shot, reportedly on a prairie in Winnipeg.

The young actress who takes up the lead role of Laura Ingalls -- the aforementioned Alice Halsey -- has talent that is otherworldly.

Like the novels, the TV series is suitable for children, but it is anything but childish. 

For example, in Episode One, the Ingalls family is having a relatively peaceful passage to their new homestead when, suddenly, the entire family is nearly killed.

When they arrive in Independence, they begin to encounter the characters who will play various parts in their adventure.

These include the local physician who is African American, native Americans of the Osage tribe living uneasily nearby, and a man who lives alone on the homestead property next door who Charles hires to help build the family home.

Credit for the unusually high quality of this new “Little House” goes primarily to Rebecca Sonnenshine, the showrunner who developed and wrote the series.

Family television of this caliber ranges from rare to nonexistent in our streaming-centric world today. “Little House” is a big pleasure. 

“Little House on the Prairie” starts streaming on Thursday, July 9, on Netflix.