Who will free the trad wives trapped in a Little House on the Prairie?

The idea that life was simpler way back when relies on a kind of collective amnesia. It might be nice to stop worrying about our screen-time report, but the further back you go the more you realise the fruits of social progress, like, say, modern medicine, are somewhat helpful. In the case of Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of her real childhood growing up in a pioneer family in the late 19th century, the past is a seductive mirage.

Here we see the idyllic wonder of pioneer living, with an eight-episode series heavy on ASMR crop rustling, twitching rabbits and Mumford & Sons-esque banjo singalongs. “Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura left their house in the big woods of Wisconsin,” says the kindly narrating voice as they trundle off to start again from scratch out west in Kansas.

The Ingalls family arrive to disappointment in the city of Independence, Kansas, where Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) can’t afford coffee or sugar in their weekly shop and wolves pick over what land is actually up for grabs. No matter for her strapping, 1,000-yard-stare husband, Charles (Luke Bracey), who has already rescued their wagon from the river he probably shouldn’t have tried to cross, and has now found them a plot to build their new house on.

When a neighbour drops by with cake she cheerfully says: “It’s up to the women to make it happen!” She places the burden of building a community on Caroline, who is now trapped literally by a log falling on her ankle and metaphorically by the oppressive expanse of the prairie lands. But if this adaptation has questions about the domestic drudgery that women today are still enticed and imprisoned by, it doesn’t dare to share them. Instead, we have hair plaiting and wicker bonnets, dramatic landscapes and a moral code which feels like revisionist history.

The same haughty neighbour tries to warn the family about accepting extra muscle from a shady local drunk to build their house, but her advice is brushed off: the family’s belief in the goodness of people is steadfast. This openness doesn’t seem to honestly reflect attitudes in parts of the US, either back then or today. 

In Sky’s The Five-Star Weekend we find another trapped tradwife of America in Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner). Hollis is an influencer who performs domestic femininity not for her family but at the cost of it, instead serving her army of dependent fans. Based on the 2023 novel by Elin Hilderbrand, the story begins after Hollis’s husband dies suddenly, inspiring her to invite four friends from various stages of her life (all serendipitously at crossroads in their own lives) for a weekend on her sprawling Nantucket compound. Tatum (Chloë Sevigny), Dru-Ann (Regina Hall), Gigi (Gemma Chan) and Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) swoop in to offer emotional support and are met by overflowing gift baskets and Hollis shucking oysters. If this is Instagram, where is reality?

The tradwife influencer is having a moment in popular culture, with Caro Claire Burke’s satirical novel Yesteryear riding high in the bestseller lists in both the UK and US. There are glimpses of a similar curiosity in the toxic positivity foisted on women in The Five-Star Weekend, but it is tonally too greedy. It is at once a Nancy Meyers romcom (there’s a song from Hans Zimmer’s It’s Complicated score, swooping drone shots of huge houses, and a lot of KitchenAid appearances) and a gritty grief story in the mould of Big Little Lies. This is both ultra-processed comfort food TV and a complex drama, with occasionally maddening results.

As Tatum asks before the group’s next staged photo op: “Are we supposed to Meghan Markle cosplay all weekend?” As a bright, breezy piece of coastal escapism, stuffed with sizzled scallops and twirled spaghetti, The Five-Star Weekend succeeds with the help of some memorable one-liners and strong performances. But by skewering lifestyle content while also offering a second helping, it wants to have its galette and eat it too.

A more straightforward piece of escapism is on the menu in Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook Remember… The Office, a BBC documentary looking back on the show in its “silver jubilee year”, as Crook says.

For the most part, this is a cosy love-in for fans to laugh again at staplers entombed in jelly, see photos from behind the scenes, and watch the pair crack up over Gareth’s immortal line: “He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?”

There’s a pleasing Gareth and Tim-like banter as the pair reminisce, with Freeman teasing Crook about missing the Golden Globes because he was filming with Al Pacino. Still, a few spiky moments stand out. First, Freeman admits he was “a little annoyed” when Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant decried any suggestion of improvisation on set. He points out that published scripts were in fact transcripts of what had been on TV, not the written scripts, thus robbing the actors of credit for any riffs on the day.

Then there’s Crook talking about his annoyance at hearing about the US reboot, which came soon after the BBC show had found success. “Why do they need to do that? We’ve done it, haven’t we?” Crook thought at the time, confessing he still has never seen it.

The absence of Gervais looms large in this documentary, but his spirit lives on in clips, stories and one inadvertently David Brent quote from Freeman. “I remember hearing at the time that [Paul] McCartney used to get it videoed… ” he says wistfully. “And I think that might have been true.”

Photograph by Eric Zachanowich/Netflix