Melissa Gilbert is reflecting on the literally explosive ending of Little House on the Prairie in the TV movie Little House: The Late Farewell 41 years later.
In the TV movie, the people of Walnut Grove fought against a tycoon and ultimately detonated explosives in the buildings as the Ingalls family watched. Former child star Gilbert starred as Laura Ingalls in the original series, which aired from 1974 to 1984. The show, which was an adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, starred Michael Landon as Charles aka Pa Ingalls; Landon also executive produced, directed and wrote episodes of the show.
“I knew that [Landon] wanted to demolish everything because he was so angry that NBC never called him to tell him the show was officially canceled,” Gilbert, 60, told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published on Thursday, February 6.
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“We just weren’t on the fall schedule after not just 10 years of Little House, but years of Bonanza. It was just such a disrespectful thing to do to him,” she said, referring to Landon’s role in the western show, which came to an end in 1973 after 14 seasons. “I do remember reading the script and going, ‘Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, OK. Wow!’ For me personally, that whole experience from reading the script until the last day was the longest funeral I’d ever attended.”
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She continued, “It was so heartbreaking. Every day it was somebody else’s last day. Every day we had to say goodbye to someone else. And then when they blew it all up and we gathered that final, final day, it was just devastating and horribly, horribly sad.”
Gilbert wrote in 2010’s Prairie Tale: A Memoir that Landon wanted to blow up the town as a “f— you to the network” — and recalled his intentions in her interview on Thursday.
“One of the things we talked about was his desire to not have anyone else use our sets — like to have some porn out there shooting [on old Little House sets],” Gilbert said. “Those were ours. We built them. I mean, I had so many major life experiences in and around all of those buildings, as did everyone on the cast and crew. That place was sacred to us in a big way.”
For Gilbert, walking on to set for the final day after the town was destroyed was “gutting.” (The cast wasn’t on set for the actual explosions.)
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“It was just painful. Knowing that we were going to walk down from basecamp that it was not going to be there, but not knowing exactly what we were going to see, I imagine it’s not nearly — and I’m going to underline ‘nearly’ eight times — what it’s like when people go home after a natural disaster, as we’ve seen in Los Angeles and Wilmington and so many other places,” Gilbert said. “To see these buildings — they were not just façades, they were buildings — where we’d gone to school, where we’d communed, where we gathered and spent such an intense 10 years of all of our lives just flattened, I can understand on a very, very tiny scale what it feels like to lose your home to something like that.”
Gilbert said there were “absolutely” real tears being shed in the scenes where men are detonating the explosives. “And the thing was we’d all be OK for a few minutes, and then someone would start crying and then everyone would start crying,” she said. “And it wasn’t just us on camera, it was the crew behind the camera, too. They were standing in this rubble and they saw it blow up the day before, or a couple days before. But that was our last day together.”
Now, more than four decades later, Netflix revealed that the streaming platform ordered a Little House reboot series. Gilbert, for her part, told Entertainment Weekly that she supports the reboot.
“I think there’s room in the Little House universe for all different kinds of stories to be told — just like there was always room in the Little Women universe to keep retelling that story,” Gilbert said. “These are classic stories, and no one’s done it where they hewed to the books completely. [The original] was Michael Landon’s interpretation, and now it’s time for someone else’s interpretation. And I think there’s plenty of room for that. And I think there’s a lot of other stories to mine beyond that. So I think this opens the door in a lot of ways for all kinds of Little House on the Prairie projects.”
Little House: The Last Farewell is streaming now on Peacock.
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