Alison Arngrim jokes that the cast is 'baffled' at show's enduring popularity

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https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...130059620.html

Raechal Shewfelt·Editor, Yahoo Entertainment
Fri, March 17, 2023 at 6:00 AM PDT·9 min read

Alison Arngrim is frozen in the minds of TV viewers everywhere as spoiled, mean girl Nellie Olsen on Little House on the Prairie, even decades after the beloved show wrapped up a whopping nine seasons on March 21, 1983. Part of it is that it continues to air in reruns, with fans gathering regularly to celebrate it and coming up to Arngrim. The other reason?

"The why everyone still loves Little House, this is a question that's kind of baffled all of us," she jokes to Yahoo Entertainment. "We're like, 'Yeah, it was good, but it was 50 years ago!'"

Arngrim notes that VCRs weren't even widely available when the show debuted in 1974, but, somehow, the family drama has "exploded again and again," with parents showing it to their kids, passing it on from generation to generation. She suspects viewers are attracted to the emotional side of the series, based on the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. After all, they're essentially telling the story of a family struggling to survive; it just happens to be set in the late 1800s. Arngrim plays the daughter of the rich family in town, the Olesons, and, of course, her character learned to be as awful as she is from her mother, Mrs. Oleson, played by the late Katherine MacGregor.

Fans all over the world, Arngrim says, have told her that what they love is Little House's very relatable premise: "It's a family and they're poor, and they have a lot of children, and they live in two rooms, and they're constantly wondering if they're gonna make it through the year. And there's a family in town who are kinda rich and snotty and they're horrible, and everyone has a Mrs. Oleson at their job and everyone has a Nellie at their school. Most of the world's not living like Dynasty and Dallas, they're living like Little House on the Prairie. And this seemed to strike a nerve emotionally with people all over the world, and that seems to hold up."

Another thing that has held up over the years are the friendships between cast members, who also include late writer/director/executive producer Michael Landon (Pa), Melissa Gilbert (Laura), Karen Grassle (Ma) and Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary). Sadly, some of them have died, but the ones who are still around meet up or chat by phone or email regularly.

Arngrim hasn't watched the show in a while, she says, although she owns all the DVDs, but there are still ones that stand out to her. The first is her hands-down favorite episode, which, she explains without hesitation, is "Bunny," a Season 3 episode in which Nellie falls off Laura's horse named Bunny — because why not? — and, being her awful self, takes advantage of the situation. After Laura finds out that Nellie is exaggerating her injury, she goes about getting her revenge, sending Nellie and her wheelchair into a creek.

"We get to finally see her get it good," Arngrim says, "so people like that one!"

Not that it was easy to film. As Arngrim explains in her 2010 memoir, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch, it was captured by Gilbert pushing the back of her chair, which was attached to a a steel cable. "The cable jerked [taut], and the chair stayed put. But I almost didn't," she wrote. "You see, there was nothing holding me in the chair. I was just sitting there sliding around in my nightgown with no seat belt, nothing."

To make matters worse, Arngrim was nursing a broken arm, which she'd injured skateboarding.

While a stunt girl took the actual plunge, Arngrim did have to take a ride down a less steep hill, albeit with rocks, so cameras could capture her "screaming my head off."

Even so, Arngrim told Yahoo Entertainment in May 2021 that, for child actors, being on Little House was like winning the "child safety lottery."