‘Little House on the Prairie’ Stars Dean Butler & Alison Arngrim Respond to Megyn Kelly’s “Wokeify” Tweet Criticizing Reboot
Seemingly as soon as Netflix announced that they would be producing a new version of beloved ’70s series Little House on the Prairie, former Fox News and NBC News host Megyn Kelly took to X.com to announce, “@Netflix if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” But as original Little House stars Alison Arngrim and Dean Butler told ReMIND, the show was always “woke” — and in fact, that sensitivity might actually be part of the secret of its success.
.@Netflix if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project. https://t.co/RkAO8vPq65
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 30, 2025
“Well, the [original] show was about as woke as you could get for 1974,” says Arngrim. “We dealt with … everything on Little House on the Prairie from drug addiction to racism, to sexism, to spousal abuse. Women’s rights, we absolutely had the episode where the women held out for right to own property … Every possible cutting edge social issue was absolutely discussed … but it was done in such a ‘Little House on the Prairie, what would the Ingalls do’ kind of way, that I think people just didn’t even think of it as being a big deal.”
“Little House was incredibly woke,” Butler notes. “It’s just woke in a very simple, sweet way. It’s not beating you over the head with it, but it’s really woke — and from that, I’m going to say I think woke is a good thing. I don’t think woke is a bad thing. Woke has been turned into a dirty word. It’s not a dirty word. Woke is aware, it’s progressive, it’s understanding that the world ebbs and flows and changes.”
Butler also thinks that very sensitivity and sense of progressiveness accounts for the show’s lasting and far-reaching success: “The show still runs in 140 countries every day, all over the world in over 40 languages. There’s a reason for that. And the reason is because everybody feels welcome there, and Michael made sure that everybody could feel welcome there.”
Read the full ReMIND interview with Arngrim, Butler, and Rachel Lindsay Greenbush below:
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1974 (50 Years Ago)
January 2024
In this time capsule issue of ReMIND Magazine we look back 50 years ago to 1974!
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