Melissa Gilbert Claims Michael Landon 'Wanted to Demolish Everything' inLittle HouseTV Movie After Show's Cancellation

Mar. 15, 2025

Frank Carroll/NBCU Photo Bank; NBC/Peacock

Little House on the Prairie’s ending was not whatMelissa Gilbertever would’ve predicted.

In 1984, after 10 seasons of the 19th-century period western series — a semi-autobiographical look at Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life based on her books — the Ingalls family’s story culminated inLittle House: The Last Farewell.

The move was partially out of a desire to “not have anyone else use our sets,” she toldEntertainment Weekly, as it was “sacred to us in a big way,” but it was also a way to send a message to the network.

Melissa Gilbert and Dean Butler in ‘Little House: The Last Farewell’.NBC/Peacock

NBC/Peacock

“I knew that he wanted to demolish everything because he was so angry that NBC never called him to tell him the show was officially canceled,” she claimed of what motivated Landon, who died in 1991 at age 54, to blow up the set.

“We just weren’t on the fall schedule after not just 10 years ofLittle House,but years ofBonanza,” she said, referring to the Western series Landon starred in from 1959 to 1973 on NBC beforeLittle House.“It was just such a disrespectful thing to do to him.”

She added, “For me personally, that whole experience from reading the script until the last day was the longest funeral I’d ever attended.”

Gilbert also recalled filming the final installment of the Ingalls family’s story as being “so heartbreaking.”

The townsfolk of Walnut Grove walk through the rubble in ‘Little House: The Last Farewell’.NBC/Peacock

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“To see these buildings — they were not just facades, they were buildings — where we’d gone to school, where we’d communed, where we gathered and spent such an intense 10 years of all of our lives just flattened, I can understand on a very, very tiny scale what it feels like to lose your home to something like that,” she said.

source: people.com