Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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In The Little House on the Prairie, a 6-year-old Laura Ingalls describes the experience of waking up in her family’s cabin on the Osage Diminished Reserve amid a bout of the “fever ‘n’ ague.” As she lay in bed, “an arm lifted under her shoulders, and a black hand held a cup to her mouth.” Above her, a “face smiled, and a deep voice said, softly, ‘Drink this, little girl,’” Laura recalls. “‘Drink it. It will make you well.’”
Around the summer of 1870, the real Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family — father Charles, mother Caroline and sister Mary — contracted malaria and became confined to their cabin around Independence in Southeast Kansas. A man named Dr. George Tann (Wilder used just one “n” in the book) was a Black practitioner of eclectic medicine who lived about a mile from the family and administered the quinine that saved their lives.
Outside of Wilder’s autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in which she writes that Tann delivered her sister Carrie, the doctor is present in only a single chapter of the Little House series. The 1974 NBC series offered similarly brief portrayals, through separate single-episodic appearances of Black doctors like Dr. Caleb Ledoux (Don Marshall) and Dr. Tane (Don Pedro Colley).
But in Netflix’s upcoming adaptation, releasing July 9, actor Jocko Sims will portray the doctor Ingalls immortalized in her best-selling book across all of season one, capturing the “drawling” voice and “rolling, jolly laugh” of a man who left a warm impression — even on the Ingalls’ beloved dog, Jack, “who hated strangers and never let one come near the house,” but “begged him to come in.”
In that way, the series pays homage to the life of a real Black man, who showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine describes as a “connector of different communities and different economic strata” in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. “I often describe the show as the story of how America became America. It’s not men riding around with guns, it’s communities coming together.”
“I really wanted someone who moved between worlds, who had a very small life in Pennsylvania, realizing that he wanted more after being changed by the war, which led him to apprentice as a doctor. The West is calling to him in a different way than someone like Charles [Ingalls], but it’s the same allure, which is that I can reinvent myself,” Sonnenshine tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s the idea that war sends you to places that you never would’ve gone, and how that opens up the world. That’s where we started with a character who treated the white settlers, the Black settlers who were there, and also treated the Osage and the Cherokee. People now say that that couldn’t be, but it was true.”
Born to a freed family likely in 1835, Tann worked on their Pennsylvania farm before marrying and having a child. Several aspects of his early life — his birth year, why he left his first family, a job as a peddler, service in the Union Army and how he became an eclectic physician — are unclear due to conflicts or gaps in historical documentation. But by 1869, records indicate he and his parents used the Homestead Act to move to Montgomery County, Kansas, where he would meet and save the Ingalls.
As a practitioner of herbal remedies and physical therapy in Kansas and later the Cherokee Nation (now Oklahoma), he treated locals regardless of their race out of homes and businesses. He also opened at least one hospital with money reportedly earned from mineral rights on the land he purchased. With so little in Ingalls’ book, Sonnenshine notes “we’ve taken many things and then expanded upon them” for the show, using Tann’s available history and more to deliver their spin on the physician.
That included using World War I and II memoirs to extrapolate for the post-Civil War set show in the absence of memoirs from the era. She also acquired a PDF of Eileen Charbo’s out-of-print book, Doctor Fetched by the Family Dog: The Story of Dr. George A. Tann, Pioneer Black Physician. These helped lay the show’s groundwork for Tann’s journey to becoming a doctor, “most certainly not from medical school, but by apprenticeship,” the showrunner says, “likely in the war, where he studied with doctors on the battlefield.”
Available census records also helped flesh out Tann and other Black characters, like Barrett Doss’ Emily Harrison, a general store owner and Tann’s love interest whose name nods to Eliza Harris, the real doctor’s second wife.
“Kansas joined the Union in 1861, and there was a real question of whether it was going to join as a slave state or a free state. There were skirmishes between factions who moved there, specifically to try and make that happen on one side or the other. So there were lots of Black Americans living there, like the town of Nicodemus, which we reference in the season,” she says. “America’s never been a white space, but in particular, Kansas. You had a real mixing, especially after the war. People just don’t know that because we haven’t depicted it.”
While the writers leaned on historical accounts to better realize their Dr. Tann, Little House readers will still recognize Wilder’s doctor, especially in the spirit of Sims’ performance. “I read about [Dr. Tann] having this amazing bedside manner. That people really responded to him,” Sonnenshine says. “He had this presence — a deep emotional connection to people. And Jocko, he’s so warm and exudes such kindness, authority and intelligence. I was like, ‘Yes, this is the person we’re looking for to create this very rich inner life.’”
“He seemed like a nice guy, and I pictured him smiling a lot. In fact, they wrote that in the breakdown: ‘Always has a special smile,’” Sims, who had not read Wilder’s book before his casting, tells THR. “But we’re coming right out of the Civil War. I wanted to see what sort of mindset he’d be in during this time in 1869, so I started reading Frederick Douglas’ autobiography.”
He also gave the Pennsylvania-born character a little “southern charm,” a nod to the character and actor’s journeys moving between two worlds. “Growing up in Texas my first 19 years and then living 18 years in Los Angeles, it was quite different,” he tells THR. “The Black community, we’re not a monolith, and I definitely wanted to apply that idea to Dr. Tann.”
On the Canadian set in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Sims completed cowboy camp, as well as dancing and singing lessons (the latter for a caroling scene with Doss that was cut). The props department created a book for the actor with period illustrations and drawings about frontier medical care, while the stunts department ensured that in a scene where Tann reattaches someone’s shoulder, he was using period-accurate techniques. “I was preparing the wrong way, and they were like, ‘They didn’t know that way. It was a lot rougher.’”
Little House costume designer Mitchell Travers says depicting Tann’s physical appearance was about understanding what a free Black man looked like in 1869, even with limited visual references. “We were at this crossroads in American history where there was even more prejudice than we have now prevailing. So it was very important as a freed Black man to communicate to people who you are ahead of time,” he says.
Tann was also “unlike a lot of other men in our story. He was a wealthier single man who could put that little bit of extra financing towards the way he was dressed,” adds Travers. The costume designer notes the doctor could wear glasses, an expression of his wealth, as well as get a suit “made based on fashion plates of the time.”
“He was born into a free family, so it was important to me that we show a little bit of generational wealth,” he adds. “We looked at silk prints in some of the things that we utilized — his ascots or his handkerchiefs. Some of the prints are from the 1840s, as if they were given to him by his father, because we wanted to create a sense of history for him using the textiles he’d have access to.”
Tann’s linen duster, in particular, was a piece that “struck the perfect chord” for the costume designer, illustrating the doctor’s duality — a man of finery facing the realities of work and the frontier. “For a modern eye used to seeing a doctor in a lab coat, we’re trying to tell the story of a real doctor who practiced eclectic medicine. There is no lab coat for that, but we want the audience to experience him as somebody who could aid in a crisis, who they get a sense of relief from,” Travers adds. “There is this bit of comfort that comes from the first visuals of this man, and the timing of his introduction on the show is really key.”
“He’s the first person to meet the Ingalls, and he’s the last one to say goodbye,” says Sonnenshine while discussing adapting Tann’s role across season one. “He gives Charles some tough love and says, ‘You’ve got to make a community here because you can’t do it on your own. That’s a myth.’ Charles takes that to heart because he trusts this person.”
She continues: “It’s the idea of community. Maybe you’re not used to reaching out to different people, but the frontier is a new place where you’re going to be in contact with people that you haven’t met before and whose cultures you’ve never experienced, and you’re going to have to come together out here. That is the story of how we succeed.”
After wanting to be a doctor in high school and spending nearly a decade of his acting career portraying them in shows like The Resident and New Amsterdam, the opportunity to not only get more storyline than his counterparts, but project the idea of care and kinship in post-Civil War America, is meaningful, says Sims. Even if it wasn’t thinking “about the gravitas of it” while filming.
It remains important, he says, as Black doctors still only constitute 5.7 percent of all U.S. physicians, despite their life-saving impact in healthcare environments, which the actor highlights through his website MoreBlackDoctors.org.
“[In New Amsterdam], I didn’t realize that I was actually affecting people on different levels who were watching. I would have mothers tweet me and say, ‘Thank you for representing Dr. Reynolds. My son now wants to be a doctor.’ I got to have this conversation at SeriesFest in Denver a couple of years ago, and helped raise money for a college fund,” he recalls. “For this opportunity to come again and experience it in a different way was an honor. I credit the Friendlies, producers Trip [son of Ed Friendly, executive producer of the 1974 NBC series] and Rebecca, for wanting to tell Dr. Tann’s story. Twenty years, Trip told me, he had been trying to get the show off the ground.”
Tann’s expanded presence could also inspire audiences to seek out more about the real man and the larger role of Black Americans in the West, just as it has for the actor. “I’m still learning things about him. He was adored. He was immersed in Native American cultures, speaking different languages while taking care of people,” Sims says. “I would welcome the opportunity to get to know him even more and spend more time digging and talking to historians.”
But Sims says he’s also ready for pushback. “We’ll get some hate, people calling it woke. I’ve already seen a couple of people say, ‘Oh, they’re adding these characters in.’ Megyn Kelly took some shots before there was a page written, but I love what [star of the NBC series] Melissa Gilbert said back to her. It was like, ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the original show, but we were pretty woke,’” Sims tells THR. “Unfortunately, that’s the culture we’re in nowadays, where there has been this concerted effort to diminish DEI efforts — and that’s not even what this is. This is just telling true stories.”
That will not be the only conversation around Little House’s adaptation of Tann. Over the years, the literary community has debated the continued inclusion of Wilder’s dated, and at times offensive, language and depictions in her books tied to Black and Indigenous people. For Sonnenshine, when crafting her version of the doctor, she approached him through the “generosity of spirit” she felt while reading Wilder’s books, essays and columns, and the author’s ability to relay “the perspective of characters who were outsiders.”
“I think she remembered this doctor very fondly… [and] just the small way in which she talked about this doctor reverentially was kind of radical in that time. That right there tells you a lot about that person,” the showrunner says. “These books were written in the ’30s, and that’s a risk to write in the ’30s. A lot of our thoughts about all that are also shaped by pop culture, which had an agenda to be a little bit more of a white space.”
And while Sonnenshine is aware of how underlying biases can can be filtered through literature or newspaper articles, to her, Wilder still felt very humanist.
“We really had this character who felt deeply and thought deeply about the people she’d met on the frontier and who they were. Of course, there are problematic things in the books, but I felt like she was a very open-minded, expansive spirit of a person. In translating that into a show, that’s the spirit I felt with her as an adult that would read very well. I never write anything that I don’t think is plausible, and I believe that if you could talk to her today, she would say, ‘I really valued all the things and people and ideas that I came into contact with.’”
While Sims is aware his character might spark a number of feelings among the show’s multiple audiences, he believes Tann’s depiction can serve as a launching pad. “The first book and the first season are a great way to start the conversation by introducing Dr. Tann and letting all of the negativity and the positivity come out so we can have the conversation,” he says.
In the meantime, the actor — whose role does not continue into the currently filming season two — says he’s “going to stay on the writers about” a spin-off concept. “I feel there’s so much there, not just with working with and taking care of Indigenous peoples, but the hospitals that he had in Oklahoma and Kansas. Then the Civil War aspect. What a life. I feel people would be curious about and pleasantly surprised that there was this individual in the 1800s, a Black man, beloved by many cultures. How incredible would that story be?”
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Little House on the Prairie releases on Netflix on July 9.
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