Rebecca Sonnenshine is an adapter by trade, and a careful one: she takes other people's stories and makes them tidier, kinder and more sensible than they were. That is a skill, and on the evidence so far it is also the limit.
Fi1m perspective
On Rebecca Sonnenshine's prairie nobody is hungry for long, nobody is cold for long, and dirt is something that happens to boots. In her script for The Housemaid (2025) the housemaid spends a full hour being mistreated and noticing things before the plot lets her do anything about it. These are different faults, but they come from the same hand. Sonnenshine gives every character clear, sensible things to say and almost nothing to hide, and sensible people with nothing to hide are pleasant company and poor drama.
She has spent most of her career working from other people's material. Two horror features, The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008) and The Keeping Hours (2017), then five years on The Vampire Diaries (2011–2016) under Julie Plec, with whom she has worked five times. Outcast and The Crossing followed, then two seasons of The Boys (2019–2020), where she wrote and produced and built the second-season finale on the bones of Ocean's Eleven and Casablanca. Archive 81 (2022) was the first programme she ran herself. Then The Housemaid, then eight episodes of Little House on the Prairie (2026).
The best of her is in what she adds. Her Little House does not take the Ingalls' right to the land for granted, and it makes room for the Osage and for Black settlers, which neither Laura Ingalls Wilder nor the 1974 series did. When Erica Tremblay's episode slows down, holds on a face and lets a silence run to the end, you can see the programme the whole run might have been. It is the one hour in eight where the adults have something to say to each other that is not a plan.
We were restless through most of the rest, and we know why: each hour works through a list of incidents from the books and gets to the credits with nobody in real want. The Housemaid made us impatient for the opposite reason. Sonnenshine keeps Sydney Sweeney's Millie standing there and taking it for sixty minutes so that Amanda Seyfried can set the second hour alight, and when the fire came we felt relief more than pleasure. She has said of the Wilder books that "Everything in my life has been jump-started by these books," and the devotion shows. She is too fond of this family to let anything hurt them for long.
She writes horror and thrillers by preference, so she knows how to frighten people when the material asks. What we would like to see is a Sonnenshine script in which somebody is allowed to be cold, hungry and wrong for a whole episode. Until then, start with The Housemaid and be patient with the first hour, or with The Boys, where nobody in the room was worrying about being nice.
Biography
Rebecca Sonnenshine is a writer and producer. She graduated from the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and received a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting in 1999. Early in her career she produced the feature films Bunny (2000), which received an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and Reversion (2008), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Her television writing credits include episodes of The Vampire Diaries (2009–2016), Outcast (2016), The Crossing (2018) and The Boys (2019–2022), for which she received Emmy nominations. She developed, wrote and served as showrunner on the Netflix series Archive 81 (2022). Sonnenshine wrote the screenplay for the 2025 film The Housemaid and developed and showruns the 2026 Netflix adaptation of Little House on the Prairie.
