Netflix’s Take on ‘Little Women’ Is Beyond Anything Alcott Could Have Dreamed of
Little Women adaptations have long graced the stage and screen, each version playing with various elements of Louisa May Alcott’s famous novel. Some, like the beloved 1994 movie and the BBC’s 2017 Maya Hawke-led serial, have been more faithful to the source text. Others, like Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film, interweave moments from the novel’s two volumes to tell a more profound story. Clare Niederpruem’s 2018 movie modernizes the work; Kate Hamill’s 2018 play revolutionizes it; the 1933 film simplifies it.
With so many versions, we could learn a lot about one another by asking, “Which Little Women is your Little Women?”
But no adaptation has pushed past the original text quite like director Kim Hee-won’s TV series, which premiered earlier this month. It will cover the novel across 12 episodes, a new one dropping each Saturday and Sunday on Netflix until Oct. 9. The show thrusts Alcott’s novel into modern South Korea, placing its version of the March sisters into a melange of embezzlement, murder, and high-society drama. The result is an entertaining mystery that’s surely worth a watch—if you leave your preconceived notions about Little Women at the door.