Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 14, 2015

For four seasons of Little House on the Prairie the stalwart Ingalls family encountered any number of trials, tribulations and obstacles, overcoming them with a positive attitude, collegiality with their townsfolk (even those who probably didn’t deserve it), and untold love and affection within their family unit. It was a patently fake artifice, miles removed from the way the Old West probably “really” was, and yet this tendency to march straight toward a happily ever after by any given episode’s wrap up made the series something akin to television comfort food, a large, satisfying portion of hokum and sentimentalism that may have been unrealistically picture perfect, but which affirmed the nobler attributes of Mankind in general and the Pioneer Spirit in particular. That may be why the arc that began developing toward the end of the fourth season seemed to connect on such an expectedly visceral emotional level. (For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past several decades, a bit of a spoiler follows, so continue at your own peril.) In a brief but compelling storyline that brought the fourth season to a somewhat unbalanced close, elder Ingalls daughter Mary (Melissa Sue Anderson) discovers she’s going blind, and suddenly the sanguine blandishments of father Charles (Michael Landon) and mother Caroline (Karen Grassle) weren’t enough to solve the issue by the ending credits. It was a development that seemed to portend a new richness in the series, which even longtime fans may have felt was getting a bit musty as it trundled through its fourth year. Unfortunately, it was a relatively short-lived trauma, one that weirdly is pushed somewhat to the veritable back burner as the series begins trundling through its fifth year. In a sign that ostensible showrunner Landon may have realized the bloom was off the rose, the erstwhile “Little Joe” started cribbing more overtly from the Bonanza playbook, recycling not just old plots from the venerable series about the Cartwrights, but following that series’ attempts to inject new life into a long running enterprise by introducing new semi-regulars in the mix, in the hopes of shaking things up a bit. It’s an only occasionally effective gambit, and while Little House on the Prairie continues to mine traditional tropes of home and hearth in its fifth season, there’s an increasingly tired, “been there, seen that” feeling to the series. For those wanting to catch up on the story so far, our reviews of the series’ previous seasons can be accessed by clicking on the following links:

Little House on the Prairie: Season One Blu-ray review

Little House on the Prairie: Season Two Blu-ray review

Little House on the Prairie: Season Three Blu-ray review

Little House on the Prairie: Season Four Blu-ray review

Not only is Mary’s infirmity at least relatively tangential as the fifth season gets underway, once again Little House on the Prairie seems to be considering a venue change, this time with the result that the series might have needed to be retitled Little Hotel on the Prairie. While this particular choice actually plays into an overall arc of Charles wanting to keep the family together as much as possible, to some longtime viewers it’s going to smack of a similar gambit the show underwent toward the end of its third season, when the Ingalls set off for supposedly greener (or, actually, golder) pastures, only to figure out that Walnut Grove was where they truly belonged. Guess what happens this season after a few interstitial episodes?

Much as Bonanza started adding younger male quasi-Cartwrights to take the place of departed characters like eldest son Adam, Little House on the Prairie offers the first of what turned out to be a series of orphans who enter the Ingalls’ orbit. In this case it’s Albert (Matthew Laborteaux), a sweet little boy whose addition is perhaps meant to up the cuteness quotient now that Melissa Gilbert was moving into her teen years. (For perhaps questionable reasons, the series frankly never seemed that interested in exploiting youngest Ingalls daughter Carrie, played by twins Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush, though this season does give the twins an episode on which they actually appear together as Carrie and her imaginary friend.)

As with previous seasons, the series continues to mine unabashedly saccharine content quite a bit of the time, despite the ongoing trials with Mary’s blindness and other calamities that strike, including a rather weird poisoning scenario that erupts late in the season. There’s never very much doubt that the Ingalls will overcome any and all problems thrust into their view, though, something that keeps the characters from ever seeming that threatened, a continuing (and in fact escalating) problem as the show moved on for several more seasons. Once again there are a number of colorful recurring and guest star roles, including good turns by Merlin Olsen as Jonathan Garvey and even a pre-Throw Momma from the Train Anne Ramsey in one episode.

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.36:1. While there are some minor discrepancies in this season that augur a very slight downturn in overall video quality, all in all this is a worthy successor to the series' previous four seasons on Blu-ray. As I also mentioned in our Little House on the Prairie: Season Four Blu-ray review, there are some variances in color space in this season, and at times the palette seems slightly blanched, without some of the nicely saturated hues that suffused previous years. There are also a few more noticeable scratches and the like, which, while certainly not a huge issue, are still visible and at times a bit distracting. Clarity and sharpness are in line with previous seasons. There is the same slight telecine wobble in the opening credits that was evident in previous seasons.

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five continues the tradition of offering a serviceable DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track, one which capably supports the series' dialogue and good use of sound effects. Everything is cleanly and clearly presented, with excellent prioritization, and there no issues of any kind to cause concern.

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Little House Phenomenon Part Five - Stories to Remember (1080p; 15:10) continues with the generally agreeable enough multi-part documentary that's been part of the previous seasons' Blu-ray releases. Once again there are some good interviews with various cast and crew members.

Little House on the Prairie: Season Five Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For a brief if not exactly "shining" (given the blindness scenario, that is) moment at the end of the fourth season of Little House on the Prairie, it seemed that the series was going to eschew its typically sanguine approach to life's trials and tribulations and actually delve into at least relatively darker (no pun intended) material. That turns out to be a pipe dream as the fifth season instead traffics in well worn tropes that admittedly had served the series perfectly well in the previous four years. Fans of the series will certainly not be that crestfallen that Little House continues to be as resolutely positive and even cheery as ever, but the feeling of a missed opportunity hangs over at least the first part of this season. That said, there's still the expected amount of emotional heft in any number of episodes this season, and when taken as a whole, the fifth year of Little House on the Prairie comes Recommended.