Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert asked her fans to support a new series created by the team behind Hallmark’s When Calls the Heart.
“Hey everyone! My dear dear pal Michael Landon Jr has a potential tv series that I’d love to see get picked up at @angelstudios_inc,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “There’s a teaser trailer available on @youtube just search for Home to Harmony and then please please, please consider voting for it.”
New series
Both Michael Landon Jr. and Brian Bird, the creative team behind Hallmark Channel’s longest-running original series, have also been busy promoting the show, titled Home to Harmony.
“It has all the feels of When Calls the Heart and more,” Brian Bird wrote in a social media post.
Faith-based series
In Home to Harmony, Trent Garrett stars as Sam Gardner, a pastor who has returned to his hometown of Harmony, Indiana, following the death of his wife. A globe-trotting, motorcycle-riding hipster, Gardner is finding it difficult to settle back into small-town life, especially as he assumes leadership at a local church that does everything by the book.
To make matters even more complicated, his children are having trouble adjusting to life without their mother.
Home to Harmony
The show is based loosely on the Home to Harmony book series by Philip Gulley, a Quaker pastor, writer, and speaker from Danville, Indiana.
In addition to the Home to Harmony series, Gulley has also authored and co-authored several books on faith, including If Grace Is True, If God Is Love, If the Church Were Christian, The Evolution of Faith, and Living the Quaker Way: Timeless Wisdom For a Better Life Today.
His work also appears regularly in Indianapolis Monthly and The Saturday Evening Post.
When and Where
Bird and Landon recently released an 11-minute clip. They are working to get the series funded through Angel Studios, a crowd-sourcing platform that helps artists produce faith-based movies and shows.
With a paid membership with Angel Studios, viewers can vote on which projects get funding. If Home to Harmony is approved for production, the show could be picked up by a network, though it is not clear if Hallmark would be its home.
Fan reactions
When Bird released the clip for Home to Harmony on social media, fans were quick to weigh in.
“This looks like it will be an amazing series,” wrote one fan on Facebook.
“Eleven minutes and I’m already crying!!” wrote another.
The dream team
In 2005, Michael Landon Jr. and Brian Bird formed the production company Believe Pictures. They produced the movies The Last Sin Eater, Saving Sarah Cain, Love Comes Softly, and a film version of When Calls the Heart.
In 2014, When Calls the Heart was turned into a series starring Erin Krakow as Elizabeth Thatcher, a privileged young woman who moves to a remote coal-mining community in western Canada to teach school. She quickly falls in love, both with a handsome young Mountie and with the community of kindhearted and hard-working people of Coal Valley.
The show is currently going into its 12th season on Hallmark Channel. Bird has made it clear he would love to keep the show going indefinitely.
“… We’re going to try to catch up with The Simpsons, which is in season 42 or something like that,” he said during a 2023 fan event.