Taking Wisdom From Little House On The Prairie, This Actress Creates Her Own Award-Winning Comedy TV Series

Sand storm.

If you were playing Pictionary and your word was “Sand Storm” how would you sketch it?

Perhaps it all depends on your context. Yet, in the first episode of the comedy series Livin’ On a Prairie, Pamela is at Pictionary Party and faced with the challenge of drawing that word. Instead of sketching “sand” and “storm,” she creates an elaborate picture of a woman in a bonnet. Her arm braces her face. Wind swirls all around her.

Why?

Because Pamela is an obsessed uber-fan of a certain TV series called Little House On The Prairie. So much of her life is viewed from the lens of this groundbreaking historical drama about a family settling in the wild west from the 1870s to the 1890s.

“And there is an episode where Mary Ingalls goes out in the middle of a sand storm to find a lost child,” explains actress Pamela Bob who created, wrote, stars and co-produced the poignant, smart and uniquely hilarious series which was an official selection at the Tribeca TV Festival. “So Pamela’s first and only instinctual association to that word was this moment on Little House on the Prairie.”

In fact, art imitates life as this actually happened to Bob when faced with this clue during a Pictionary party. It also helped inspire Livin’ On A Prairie. “It wasn’t until that humiliating moment, at this Pictionary party, did I realize just how much Little House On The Prairie had seeped into my subconscious and was ingrained in my personal DNA,” says Bob whose Broadway credits includes Hand to God and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

Ever since she was a child Bob was completely smitten, well, obsessed with the television series. Adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s best-selling novels, the show was a hit on NBC for nine seasons from 1974 to 1982. It featured the challenges and joys of the Ingalls family who lived on a Minnesota farm during the later part of the 1880s.

Bob will never forget the first episode she saw where Nellie was cruel to Olga, a girl born with uneven legs. Laura Ingalls befriended Olga while her father (Pa) made Olga corrective shoes. “It was the full spectrum of the Little House experience,” recalls Bob. “And I was absolutely, totally and completely swept away.”

Growing up as the series was ending its run on primetime TV, Bob devotedly watched the show in re-runs. “Every day, at 5pm channel 11 played Little House On the Prairie. I cried and laughed,” she says. What resonated to Bob were the timeless themes unconditional love, community and family.

“It is not just a fluffy family show. The topics they cover are seriously hard core. Racism, drugs, rape, anti-semitism, you name it, they had it,” adds Bob. “It is no surprise to me that during the pandemic and awakening of civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter, Little House on the Prairie exploded. Because it tackled all of these themes.”

She points to The Wisdom of Solomon episode which guest starred Todd Bridges and tackled the harsh realities of race and discrimination and became a viral sensation over the summer. The Plague episode also went viral in 2020. “It paralleled what we were going through with Covid-19 with an almost eerie specificity,” shares Bob.

The idea to create Livin’ On A Prairie came to Bob in a dream. “When it happened, I felt an electric bolt shoot through my body, so much so that I sat straight up in bed,” she shares. “I knew I had to make this, no matter what.”

In the series Bob stars as Pamela who is trying to navigate her deep-rooted feelings of isolation, nervousness and awkwardness. Her ultimate escape is “the un-coolest TV show of the 1970s, Little House on the Prairie,” as Bob lovingly describes it. Yet this obsessive devotion offers the same crutch that prevents her from connecting to the rest of the world. “Can Pamela have a fulfilling life when everything she craves exists only in her imagination?,” asks Bob. “This is a show about being in recovery and rejoining life.”

What’s more, Bob was able to enlist some Little House cast members to be in her series in pivotal roles. When Bob was performing on Broadway Alison Arngrim (aka Nellie Oleson) came to visit her backstage. A friendship blossomed. And not only did Arngrim agree to star in Livin’ On A Prairie, she also enlisted Charlotte Stewart (the school teacher Miss. Beadle) to appear in the series too. 

Then over the summer of 2020, when Bob released Livin’ On a Prairie via social media, after each episode she added interviews from the cast of Little House. She ended up interviewing Alison Arngrim, Charlotte Stewart, Dean Butler (Almanzo), Karen Grassle (Caroline Ingalls), Hersha Parady (Alice Garvey), Radames Pera (John Jr.), Dave Friedman (Jason Carter), Wendi Lou Lee (Baby Grace), Pamela Roylance (Sarah Carter) and Dan T. McBride.

“Finally, my chance to work with all of them!,” she says as she still marvels at the experience of talking to and forging friendships with her heroes. “It was a totally surreal and amazing experience. And even more amazing was that they all agreed to do it because they loved Livin’ On a Prairie, believed in it and my work.” 

As much as the show pays homage to its source, as Bob explains Livin’ On a Prairie is not specially about Little House On the Prairie. You do not need to have ever seen Little House to understand it. “Like anyone obsessed, Little House could be swapped out with Game of Thrones, Star Wars, whatever super hero character you love,” she says. “This story is about what happens when we cannot reconcile those things we get from fiction into our real lives. And we can all relate to that.”

Livin’ On A Prairie premiered at the Tribeca TV festival and won awards at The IndieFest Film Awards, the Los Angeles Independent Film Awards and several other festivals. She and her writing partner, Jeff Pheiffer, are currently developing Livin’ On a Prairie into a half hour series.

Also, Dean Butler, who played Almanzo Wilder on Little House and is now a successful TV and documentary producer, is attached to the series and has been instrumental in its development. “If you had told me, as a younger person, that one day I’d be working along side my childhood crush, Almanzo, I would have never believed it. Not in a million years,” says Bob. “Life is crazy and beautiful.”