Michael Landon

“Little House”: A wandering family is back on TV

Now that we’re finished with July 4 and all thise 250th-birthday stuff, it’s time to leap ahead almost a century.
Yes, the founding fathers were interesting … but so were the frontier folk. A new “Little House on the Prairie” reaches Netflix on Thursday (July 9).
That moves us to the late 1860s, with Americans recovering from the Civil War. Some were pushing to new land — especially the Ingalls family.
“They moved around a lot,” writer-producer Rebecca Sonnenshine told the Television Critics Association. “The Ingalls were always on the move.” Read more…

“Highway” gets a movie reboot

“Highway to Heaven” will return to TV, three decades after the death of the man who molded it.
Michael Landon (shown here with Victor French, his co-star) created the show, produced it, directed most of the episodes and starred as a probationary angel, helping people on Earth.
The new version will be on cable’s Lifetime, with key differences: It will be a movie (not a series), planned as the first of several. And this time, the angel will be a Black woman, played by Jill Scott. Read more…