In 1997, TV Guide ranked the two-part episode "I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away" #97 on its 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
During the 1982–83 television season, with the departure of Landon and Grassle, the series was broadcast with the new title Little House: A New Beginning. The series premiered on the NBC network on September 11, 1974, and last aired on May 10, 1982. The regular series was preceded by the two-hour pilot movie, which first aired on March 30, 1974. He asked Michael Landon to direct the pilot movie, who agreed on the condition that he could also play Charles Ingalls. Television producer and NBC executive Ed Friendly became aware of the story in the early 1970s. The show is an adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder's best-selling series of Little House books. Little House on the Prairie is an American western drama television series, starring Michael Landon, Melissa Gilbert, and Karen Grassle, about a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the 1870s and 1880s.