A long-running drama based upon the "Little House" series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, "Little House on the Prairie" follows the lives of the simple, farming Ingalls family: Charles, Caroline, Mary, Laura, Carrie and then Grace and the later adopted Albert, James and Cassandra, who settle into a quaint little house on the banks of Plum Creek near the small town of Walnut Grove during the late 1800s. Often narrated by Laura, the series follows her simple farm upbringing from her childhood until her adulthood with Almanzo Wilder with whom she starts a family of her own. While the series is based upon the Little House books (and thus the real life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder), it is a very loose adaptation, with mostly only key events and elements of fact surviving the transition from book to TV series, the most important being Mary's eventual blindness, and Laura's future. Several other fictitious (some factual) characters make up the friendly community of Walnut Grove, ... Written by Ondre Lombard <olombard@lombard.dialup.cyberverse.com>
A well-written show with some definite episodes within "genres" (broad comedies, moral choices, adventure, family values, religion). As far as a complete body of work, the seasons best hold together in the first four years, ending with "I'll Be Waving as You Drive Away" (you can believe that the family had faced issues and had to move as they moved previously, in the spirit of the books and the time period)...adding additional cast and bringing back characters afterward added some confusion and some continuity problems that are well documented. The last season of episodes and the last TV movies are often lambasted as not true to style, or by having substitute families, and while this is true to a point, the new characters often were used to tell similar stories.