Dean Butler Says This ‘Very Angry’ ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Episode Determined If the Show Would Get Canceled

Little House on the Prairie could have ended with season eight, and Dean Butler says the decision to keep going came down to this episode about Laura and Almanzo.

Butler, 69, talked about the two-part episode “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow,” which aired in February 1982, on the Oct. 9 episode of the Little House 50 podcast. He was joined by his costar Alison Arngrim (who played Nellie Oleson) and cohost Pamela Bob. On the series, Butler played Almanzo Wilder, the eventual husband of Melissa Gilbert’s Laura Ingalls. 

Almanzo and Laura married in Little House’s season seven premiere, and by “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow,” she was pregnant with their child Rose. The episode was based on something that happened to the real Laura Ingalls Wilder — in 1888, the couple both contracted diphtheria, and it left Alamanzo partially paralyzed 

In “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow,” only Almanzo contracts diphtheria (a highly contagious bacterial infection that affects the respiratory system) and it is the first test for Laura and Almanzo’s marriage. Almanzo’s sister Eliza Jane (Lucy Lee Flippin) returns to town to help take care of him, but also ends up arguing with Laura. The illness, Arngrim says, left Alanzo “half paralyzed and fully cranky” and Laura “goes from starry-eyed bride to full-time nursemaid.” Arngrim added that it was “a very angry episode” where Alamanzo is “less the rugged homesteader of Laura’s books and more the Eeyore of Walnut Grove.”

Butler said of his acting during the episodes, “There could have been a more noble way to play this problem, but it was written the way it was written.” Producer Michael Landon (who also starred as Charles “Pa” Ingalls) “never tweaked” his portrayal. 

Now, watching the episodes back, he said, “I was so depressed thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is so not what I think of when I think of what this character was.’ ” He did “love” the beginning and the end of the episode, where Almanzo is back to his more normal self.

Then Butler explained, “The underlying motivation for the episode was Michael had made the decision that he was going to step away at the end of the eighth season. And [producer Kent McCray] said, ‘We need to find out if you and Melissa can carry this.’ ” Landon’s Charles and Karen Grassle’s Caroline “Ma” Ingalls left Walnut Grove after the eighth season of the show.

They told Butler and Gilbert, “So we’re going to throw every calamity we could throw at you.” Butler said that even though the episode was “depressing,” the ratings for both episodes were “spectacular,” he said, adding, “It worked really well.”  

Bob asked if Gilbert and Butler were “nervous” and wondering, “What if we can’t pull this off?”

“I think we both went into it knowing that this was very important,” he said. While he was “always nervous” about filming, he added, “I think that she and I worked very well together during this episode because we both knew that there was something at stake.”

“I think Michael and Michael used the success of this episode as the as part of the argument to say we can go on,” he said.

The show ended up going on for one more year, season nine, which ran from 1982 to 1983. The show concluded with three post-series movies.

Despite the rating success of “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow,” Arngrim, 63, said that she had “70 issues” with this episode. The most glaring was that Alamanzo contracts diphtheria because he plows his fields in the rain. 

“You don’t plow in the pouring rain,” Arngrim, whose father had a farming background, said. “You don’t even plow for several days after it rains because you can’t because it’s wet. You don’t plow in the freaking rain.”

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot went into production this summer.