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Some stories refuse to stay on the page. “Hollywood Reporter”Our Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to the screen and beyond—revealing what has changed, how it’s done, and why it matters to the creators who made it happen.
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in The little house on the meadow6-year-old Laura Ingalls describes the experience of waking up in her family’s cabin on the dwindling Osage reservation amid a bout of “fever and fever.” As she lay in bed, she “raised an arm 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 okay.”
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 southeastern Kansas. A man named Dr. George Tan (Wilder used only 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, Leading girlwhere she wrote that Tan was delivered to her sister Carrie, the doctor is only present in one chapter of the book The little house series. The 1974 NBC series featured similar vignettes, with separate single-episode appearances by black doctors such as Dr. Caleb LeDoux (Don Marshall) and Dr. Tan (Don Pedro Colley).
But in Netflix’s upcoming adaptation, out July 9, actor Jocko Sims will play the Doctor Ingalls immortalized in her best-selling book throughout the first season, capturing the “charismatic” voice and “rolling laugh” of a man who made a warm impression — even on Ingalls’ beloved dog, Jack, “who hated strangers and never let anyone near the house,” but who “begged him to come in.”
In this way, the series pays homage to the life of a real black man, whom series host Rebecca Sonnenshine describes as “a nexus between different communities and different economic classes” in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. “I often describe the series as the story of how America became America. It’s not about guys walking around with guns, it’s about communities coming together.”
The book combined Wilder’s vision with a real man’s story to build Dr. Tan
“I really wanted someone who moves between worlds, lives a very small life in Pennsylvania, and realizes that he wants more after the war changes him, which leads him to step up as a doctor. West calls to him in a different way than someone like Charles [Ingalls], “But it’s the same appeal, which is that I can reinvent myself,” Sonnenshine says Hollywood Reporter. “It’s the idea that war sends you places you would never go, 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 Cherokee. People now say that can’t be it, but it was true.”
Tan was born to a freed family, most likely in 1835, and worked on their farm in Pennsylvania before marrying and having a child. Many aspects of his early life—his year of birth, why he left his first family, a job as a traveling salesman, 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 that he and his parents used the Homestead Act to move to Montgomery County, Kansas, where he would meet and rescue the Ingalls family.
As a practitioner of herbal remedies and naturopathic medicine in Kansas and later the Cherokee Nation (now Oklahoma), he treated local residents regardless of their race outside of homes and businesses. He also opened at least one hospital with money he earned from mining rights on land he purchased. With so little in Ingalls’ book, Sonnenshine points out that “we took a lot of things and then expanded them” in the show, using Tan’s available history and more to introduce their role in the Doctor.
This included using memoirs from World War I and II to extrapolate post-Civil War exposition in the absence of memoirs from that era. I also obtained a PDF copy of Eileen Sharbaugh’s out-of-print book, The Doctor Brought by the Family Dog: The Story of Dr. George A. Tan, the pioneering black physician. This helped lay the show’s foundation for Tan’s journey to becoming a doctor, “certainly not from medical school, but through professional training,” the showrunner says, “most likely in war, where he studied with doctors on the battlefield.”
Available census records also helped flesh out Tan and other black characters, such as Barrett Doss’s Emily Harrison, a general store owner and Tan’s lover whose name refers to Eliza Harris, the real doctor’s second wife.
“Kansas joined the Union in 1861, and there was a real question about whether it would join as a slave state or a free state. And there were skirmishes between the factions that moved there, specifically to try to make it happen on one side or the other. So there were a lot of black Americans living there, like the town of Nicodemus, which we reference in this season,” she says. “America has never been a white space, but especially, Kansas. There was real mixing, especially after the war. People don’t know that because we didn’t film it.”
While the book relied on historical accounts to better understand Dr. Tan, The little house Readers will still recognize Wilder’s doctor, especially in the spirit of Sims’ performance. “I read about [Dr. Tann] Have this great bedside method. “People really responded to him. He had this presence — a deep emotional connection to people. He had this presence — a deep emotional connection to people,” Sonnenschein says. And Goku, he’s so warm and exudes kindness, authority, and intelligence. So I said to myself: Yes, this is the person we are looking for to create this very rich inner life.
Sims worked with multiple departments to balance honors with accuracy
“He seemed like a nice guy, and I imagined him smiling a lot. In fact, they wrote it in the breakdown: ‘He always has a special smile,'” says Sims, who had not read Wilder’s book before casting him. THR. “But we’re coming right out of the Civil War. I wanted to see what kind of mentality he would have been in during this time in 1869, so I started reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.”
He also gave the Pennsylvania-born character a bit of “Southern charm,” a reference to the character and the actor’s journeys between two worlds. “I grew up in Texas for the first 19 years of my life, then lived 18 years in Los Angeles, and it was completely different,” he says. THR. “The black community, we are not a monolith, and I definitely wanted to apply that idea to Dr. Tan.”
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 an actor’s book with illustrations and drawings of frontier medical care, while the stunt department ensured that in the scene where Tan reattaches someone’s shoulder, he was using precise techniques. “I was preparing the wrong way, and they were like, ‘They didn’t know that way.’ “It was more cruel.”
The little house Costume designer Mitchell Travers says depicting Tan’s physical appearance was about understanding what a free black man looked like in 1869, even with limited visual references. “We were at a crossroads in American history where there was more prejudice than there is now,” he says. “So it was very important as a liberal black man to connect with people who are ahead of the times.”
Tan was also “unlike a lot of the other men in our story,” Travers adds. “He was a much wealthier single man who could put a little extra finance into the way he dressed.” The fashion designer points out that the doctor could wear glasses, a statement of his wealth, as well as have a suit “made on the basis of the 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 the bump Silk waats in some of the things we used – his flocks or his handkerchiefs. Some of the prints are from the 1840s, as if his father had given them to him, because we wanted to create a sense of history for him using textiles he had access to.”
Tan’s linen duster, in particular, was a piece that “struck the perfect chord” for the fashion designer, illustrating the duality of the Doctor – a man of adornment confronting the realities of work and boundaries. “For a modern eye that’s used to seeing a doctor in a lab coat, we’re trying to tell the story of a real doctor who practiced eclectic medicine,” Travers adds. “There’s no lab coat for that, but we want the audience to experience him as someone who can help in a crisis, and to feel comforted by him.” “There’s a bit of comfort that comes from the first pictures of this guy, and the timing of his introduction into the show is really key.”
Dr. Tan will expand Wilder and television’s representation of black doctors
“He’s the first person to meet the Ingalls family, and the last one to say goodbye,” Sonnenschein says when discussing adapting Tan’s role across the first season. “He treats Charles with some tough love and says, ‘You have to create a community here because you can’t do it alone.’ This is a myth.” Charles takes this seriously because he trusts this person.
“It’s the idea of community,” she continues. “Maybe you’re not used to coming into contact with different people, but the border is a new place where you’ll come into contact with people you’ve never met before and never experienced their cultures before, and you’ll have to come together here. This is our success story.”
After wanting to become a doctor in high school and spending nearly a decade of his acting career portraying them in shows like Resident and New AmsterdamThe opportunity to not only get more of a story than his peers, but also highlight the idea of care and kinship in post-Civil War America, is meaningful, Sims says. Even if he wasn’t thinking “it’s serious” while filming.
It remains important, he says, as Black doctors still make up only 5.7 percent of all American doctors, despite their life-saving impact in healthcare settings, which the actor highlights through his website MoreBlackDoctors.org.
“[in[InNew Amsterdam]I didn’t realize that I was actually influencing the people who were watching on different levels. I would ask mothers to tweet me and say, “Thank you for representing Dr. Reynolds.” My son now wants to become a doctor. “I had this conversation at SeriesFest in Denver a couple of years ago, and I helped raise money for a college fund,” he recalls. “It was an honor to have this opportunity come up again and experience it in a different way. I appreciate the friendlies, the producers’ journey.” [son of Ed Friendly, executive producer of the 1974 NBC series] And Rebecca for wanting to tell Dr. Tan’s story. Tripp told me he’d been trying to get the show off the ground for twenty years.
Tan’s expanded presence could also inspire audiences to search for more about the real man and the greater role of black Americans in the West, just as it did for the actor. “I’m still learning things about him. He was likable. He was immersed in Native American cultures, and he spoke differently.” “Languages while taking care of people,” Sims says. “I would welcome the opportunity to learn more about it and spend more time excavating and talking with historians.”
But Sims says he’s also ready to fight back. “We’re going to get some hate, and the people calling it names have woken up.” I’ve actually seen some people say, “Oh, they’re adding these characters.” Megyn Kelly took some shots before writing the page, but I love it [star of the NBC series] Melissa Gilbert told her. “It was like, ‘I don’t know if you’ve seen the original show, but we were so awake,'” Sims says. THR. “Unfortunately, this is the culture we live in today, where there has been this concerted effort to diminish DEI efforts — and that’s not even what it is. This is just true storytelling.”
Dr. Tan presents new frontiers for Little house on the meadow
This won’t be the only conversation about it The little houseTan adjustment. Over the years, the literary community has debated the continued inclusion of Wilder’s archaic, and sometimes offensive, language and depictions in her books associated with Black and Indigenous people. For Sonnenschein, when crafting her version of the Doctor, she approached him through the “generosity of spirit” she felt while reading Wilder’s books, articles, and columns, and the author’s ability to convey “the perspective of characters who were outsiders.”
“I think she remembers that doctor very fondly… [and] Just the simple way she spoke of this doctor with reverence was kind of radical at the time. “That 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 ideas about all of that are also shaped by popular culture, which had an agenda to be little more than white space.
While Sonnenschein recognizes how basic biases can be filtered through literature or newspaper articles, Wilder still feels very human.
“We really had this character who felt deeply and thought deeply about the people she met on the border and who they were. Of course, there are problematic things in the books, but I felt like she was a very open, expansive spirit of a person. In translating that into a show, that’s the spirit that I felt with her as an adult who can read well. I’ve never written anything that I didn’t think was plausible, and I think if you could talk to her today, she would say, ‘I’ve really appreciated all the things and people and ideas that I’ve come into contact with.'”
While Sims realizes that his character may evoke a number of emotions among the show’s multiple audiences, he believes Tan’s portrayal can serve as a starting point. “The first book and season one is a great way to start the conversation by introducing Dr. Tan and letting all the negativity and positivity out so we can have the conversation,” he says.
Meanwhile, the actor — whose role in Season 2 is currently not continuing filming — says He’ll “stay with the book about” a tangential concept. “I feel like there’s a lot going on, not only in terms of working with indigenous people and taking care of them, but also the hospitals that he had in Oklahoma and Kansas. And then the Civil War aspect. What a life. I feel like people will be curious and pleasantly surprised that there’s this person in the 19th century, a black man, loved by so many cultures. How amazing would that story be?”
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a little house on the meadow It will be released on Netflix on July 9.
