Has anyone else noticed?

That every single episode of Little House on the Prairie is a "very special" one? Let's take tonight's, for example. In the first fifteen minutes, Laura gives birth to a son and everyone is happy and then she wakes up one morning and the baby is dead. In the second fifteen, you've got Doc Baker drinking away the pain of his being run out of town for not diagnosing what was going on with the dead baby, and then Laura's other kid gets smallpox. And now Laura and Manly and Brenda Walsh might have it too.

I loved this show when I was growing up and I kind of still do, but man it is a little depressing. Anyone remember the two parter when blind Mary's baby died in a fire? In the first episode you've got the woman who died with her screaming and holding the baby out a second-floor window before they both get burnt to a crisp. Or how about when Albert showed up (I don't remember him from the books) and got addicted to morphine and Pa had to detox him?

Of course the books had their fair share of troubles -- the bratty kid in Farmer Boy who got stung by bees after stamping on a yellowjackets nest and had to get wrapped up like a mummy in a poultice of baking soda, or the time Laura nearly drowned in On the Banks of Plum Creek, saved only by her grip on the footbridge.

Boy howdy, life on the prairie was hard.