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Best-selling book series The Baby-Sitters Club gets a modern reboot that will appeal to fans of the originals and hook in a new generation, writes Emily Colston

F licking though a babysitting app, single mum Liz (Alicia Silvertsone) gets frustrated.

“When I was a kid my mother would just call some girl in the neighbourhood on the landline and she would answer because that was part of the social contract,” she says.

And that gives her daughter, Kristy (Sophie Grace), a big idea.

The girls of the 1980s and ’90s who grew up devouring Ann M. Martin’s Baby-Sitters Club books (she’s sold some

180 million of them) are the mothers of today – just like Clueless star Silverstone herself – now wishing that finding a babysitter was as simple as picking up the phone and reaching a collective of trustworthy local teenage girls ready to rush over and take their offspring off their hands for a few hours.

“If you told me that there was this landline number that I could call at a set time, three days a week, and if I did that, I would automatically get this nice girl to come and watch my kid for two hours so that I could, like, run errands or get a haircut, I would be, like, ‘Amazing!’” Rachel Shukert, showrunner for the new Netflix series based on Martin’s books, said in a recent interview.

For mums, then, watching the show will be a matter of aspiration as well as nostalgia as they reconnect with entrepreneurial Stoneybrook middle-schoolers Kristy, MaryAnne (Malia Baker), Claudia (Momona Tamada), Stacey

(Shay Rudolph), and Dawn (Xochitl Gomez).

But the team behind the reboot is also hoping to reach a whole new audience, and to that end, some key tweaks have been made. The setting is the present day, and while the girls still use a landline (or “an oldentimes phone” as Kristy says) the

On call: The members of the new-look Baby-Sitters Club, streaming on Netflix from Friday.

makeup of the group is a little more diverse – Dawn, a blonde, blue-eyed California girl in the books, is now a Latina with a gay dad.

Director, producer and self-confessed “super fan” Lucia Aniello said they were wary of going too far, and making too many changes, however.

“(The books) were seminal for me just in terms of being a girl who was ambitious and wanted to do something in the

world,” Aniello said in a recent interview.

“We weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, we want to represent every experience out there’. We were just trying to go a little bit more relevant.”

Author Martin is also on board as a producer, and was more than happy for the team to make her work more relatable.

“I wanted any kid who was reading the books or seeing

the series now to be able to see himself or herself reflected in the characters,” she said in a recent interview.

As for what the young stars of the show think, Gomez predicted that viewers would find comfort in The Baby-Sitters Club. “The show will remind us of better and simpler times when life was more predictable,” she said.

Aniello agreed: “It’s a show about people who are just trying to be better, and kids who are maybe leading the way.”

Lucia Aniello: It’s a show about people who are just trying to be better, and kids who are maybe leading the way.

The Baby-Sitters Club, streaming from Friday on Netflix