Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie is a lot of things, but the story of the Ingalls family is not really one of them. The book that season one is based on — the third in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved nine-part series — chronicles the family’s westward journey to Kansas and their efforts to build a homestead in Indian Territory, 40 miles from the nearest town. Most of the book takes place at their home, for which the book is named, and its endearing stories of life on the prairie have inspired generations of little readers to mimic the grit, independence, and discipline that helped families like the Ingalls build the West.

In the new Netflix series, released last week, the Ingalls have become a convenient vehicle on which showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine has piled high her own characters, plot, and political agenda. (Spoilers ahead.) With many glaring factual departures from the book, it’s as if Hallmark made a movie with recycled Little House costumes and set.

No longer is the story about the Ingalls building a life alone on the frontier; in fact, Pa is scolded in the first episode for dragging his family to Kansas, because it’s “a myth that men can make it out here alone.” Changes to the plot have been made to emphasize this; in the books, the Ingalls fight off a prairie fire alone, but now the town fights it off together. As Hillary Clinton said, it takes a village.

And the village is exactly what Sonnenshine offers, with an array of DEI box-checking new characters who don’t appear in the book. They include a mean, racist lady and her fat, conniving husband, who represent “traditional, white America, looking to reproduce its institutions and values and racism and xenophobia in the West,” according to Time Magazine. There’s a friendly black storekeeper lady who is discriminated against by aforementioned evil white woman, and a girlbossing Frenchwoman who wears pants(!). And prominently featured is an Osage Indian family with a little girl Laura’s age, who are presented as a clear foil to the Ingalls family. (George Tann, the kind black doctor who appears briefly in the books, has also been reimagined as a central character.)

The moral of the story is that self-reliance is overrated and even foolish, and the frontier was actually built on kumbaya and self-discovery. (Sonnenshine said as much in an interview with Publishers Weekly.) Laura makes the point explicit in a speech to the town of Independence, Kansas, in the season finale.

“Independence isn’t about self-reliance or liberty or freedom or any of those things,” she explains. “It’s a place to come together, a place to find out who you really are.”

You see, the settlers didn’t go West to build a nation for their posterity. “We came here to be the best versions of ourselves,” Ma reminds Pa, sounding like a 21st-century woman with her therapist on speed dial. (Elsewhere, Ma says her vision for the town is “a place where everyone can become who they’re meant to be,” and “What if this is where we finally become who we were meant to be?” Just in case you didn’t pick up on the theme the first few times, the storekeeper puts it this way: “Don’t you deserve a home where you feel like you belong? Isn’t that what coming out here was about for all of us?”)

Even Pa is no longer inspired by a desire for freedom and Manifest Destiny, which is colonial and icky. No, Sonnenshine tells us, he dragged his family from the comforts of the Big Woods because of a fight with his relatives, which we later learn happened because he tried to put his Civil War veteran brother in therapy. (It’s a bizarrely emphasized plot line, and completely unfaithful to the books.) The relatives all hate Pa, who is loveably naive and keeps screwing up.

“Our version of the story definitely demystifies the idea of the self-made man,” the actor who plays Pa told The New York Times. In Sonnenshine’s words, the show aspires to “not fall back on tropes of sort of masculinity.” If you’ve read the books, you know what a dishonest betrayal that is of Charles Ingalls. A great part of the original story’s charm is derived from Laura’s unquestioning adoration and respect for her father, as he capably protects his family in the wilderness.

Now, instead of riding with wolves and hunting down panthers, Pa is forced to go through the humiliation ritual of uttering stunted dialogue like “I could say I’m your father and I know best, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore.” Such exchanges have replaced scenes from the book in which the girls are fairly but sternly disciplined by their parents — now, Mary scolds Pa and Ma when they argue.

You’ll be shocked to learn that all eight episodes were directed by and six of them were written by women, a fact that is celebrated by The New York Times. Ma “has the more substantial character arc, starting out as a submissive wife and gradually coming into her own.” Part of this trajectory involves Ma contemplating an offer from her sister to leave Pa in Kansas and go back to the Big Woods with her daughters, which she threatens to accept while in a fight with Pa. This explores how women “were the backbone of … the formation of the country,” Sonnenshine says. The show “tried to deal” with the “issue” of prairie bonnets being tradwife-coded by using a broader variety of headwear, the Times notes.

And then there’s the most glaring betrayal of all, which involves the Netflix show using Wilder’s story to explain that families like the Ingalls were bad for going west and stealing the Indians’ land. When Indians raid the Ingalls’ home in Pa’s absence, Pa runs to the Osage family to complain that he “can’t have strangers walking into my house uninvited.”

“I think they’d say the same thing,” the man explains, telling Pa that the young men of the tribe see raiding the settlers’ homes as a sort of “rent” for living on their land. Pa then asks if he can pay these reparations in advance.

The Osage negotiating a deal with the federal government for their land is the central focus of an entire 52-minute episode, in which Pa does a land acknowledgement and apologizes to his Osage friend for not seeing “the truth” because he “could only think of my own family.” Ma, who did not like Indians in the books, puts the racist settlers of the town in their place. (“I’m going to talk some men out of doing something stupid,” she says.) Earlier in the season, the beloved Mr. Edwards — who has been reimagined as a more complicated, alcoholic, trauma-burdened version of himself — suggests that “maybe” the land “doesn’t need to belong to any of us.” It’s a dramatic departure from the book, which depicts the Osage heroically preventing the other Indian tribes from attacking the settler families.

For this revisionist history, Sonnenshine received praise from Time for her “vision of frontier multiculturalism battling entrenched white supremacy,” which is a more brutal condemnation than anything I could come up with. Even this vision for the Ingalls is not sufficiently self-flagellating for Time, which chastises the show for not tarnishing the family’s reputation enough.

Sonnenshine has succeeded at hollowing out all the heart from Wilder’s stories, shaking them down for sentimentality without ever actually being profound. It’s not moving, as the books or the original 1970s television series are. It’s just there, like Pa talking to the Indians, awkwardly apologizing for its own existence.

Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women's Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.