‘When Calls the Heart’: How the Hallmark Channel Series Is Connected to ‘Little House on the Prairie’
When Calls the Heart and Little House on the Prairie share a special connection that goes beyond their historical frontier setting. In fact, there’s a good chance that the Hallmark Channel show wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the classic Michael Landon series.
Janette Oke’s books inspired ‘When Calls the Heart’
When Calls the Heart was inspired by the books of Canadian author Janette Oke. Her Canadian West series, which is set around the turn of the 20th century, follows a young teacher named Elizabeth who moves to a small town in the Canadian Rockies, where she falls in love with a local Mountie.
Oke was born more than 70 years after Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the books that inspired the Little House on the Prairie TV show. But the two authors have similar backgrounds. Like Wilder, Oke was born in a log cabin and went to a one-room school.
“I was born on the Canadian prairie. I was actually born at home. This sounds really like old, old west. I was born in a little log house,” she said in an interview with the Dove Foundation. “The doctor came out to our place to deliver me. So it sounds really, really old-fashioned. I went to a one-room country school. So a lot of what I write, it’s very much a part of my background — as a teenager, and even younger than that, I was very into the west and the pioneer days.”
‘Little House on the Prairie’ star Michael Landon’s son turned ‘When Calls the Heart’ into a TV show
Wilder and Oke don’t just share a similar background. Both authors also had their work turned into popular TV shows by members of the Landon family.
Michael Landon played Charles “Pa” Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, which premiered in 1974 and ran until 1982. He also directed many episodes and was an executive producer on the show.
Landon’s son, Michael Landon Jr., spent time on the Little House set as a child, he said in a 2014 interview with The Globe & Mail. That experience had a major influence on him as an adult when he embarked on his own career in the entertainment industry. After making a movie of Oke’s novel Love Comes Softly, he began work on adapting When Calls the Heart. A TV movie aired in 2013. It was followed by a TV series, which was recently renewed for a ninth season.
“I grew up on Little House on the Prairie, my favorite of my father’s work, and it has a very special place in my heart,” he said. “So being able to do the kind of programming that I grew up on that basically has become extinct in the film and television world was exciting for me.”
Michael Landon Jr. wanted to carry on the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ legacy
With When Calls the Heart, Landon wanted to create a show that the whole family could enjoy watching together.
“I feel like we’re tapping into a large audience that’s yearning for this type of programming,” he told The Globe and Mail. “That was one of the special things for me growing up and I think that’s why I loved Little House. It wasn’t just the series itself. It was the idea that as a family we were all going to sit together and we were going to have some laughs and shed some tears and be uplifted at the end of the day, and not brought down.”
According to When Calls the Heart producer Brian Bird, Landon Jr. has succeeded in carrying on his father’s legacy.
“Michael Landon Jr. is the spitting image of his dad,” Bird told Deseret News in 2019. “[H]e is the spitting image of his dad creatively, emotionally, and professionally. What a legacy my friend has inherited — to tell uplifting life and faith-affirming stories — like his dad.”
Check out Showbiz Cheat Sheet on Facebook!
