Time-capsule feel to ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’
Vancouver-shot Netflix reboot of YA series opens with wink to origin story
Countless women who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s have memories of “The Baby-Sitters Club” books that provoke a nostalgic, pastel-hued wave of heart-eyed emojis.
Rachel Shukert, a producer and writer known for her work on “GLOW” and “Supergirl,” received the first book as a birthday present. Scanning the description on the back cover, Shukert, then in elementary school, wasn’t all that intrigued. But one uneventful afternoon she finally cracked open “The Ghost at Dawn’s House,” book No. 9 in the series, clutching the ends of its warm, peach-toned cover with the same steady grip of a kid today clinging to a tablet. She was hooked.
An entire shelf inside her bubblegum-pink room at her family home in Omaha, Neb., was eventually jammed with the recognizable rainbow block of spines (“I kept them very separate and special from all the other books,” Shukert, now 40, says. “The shelf would get bigger and bigger since there were more and more books.”)
Growing up in a town in western Massachusetts, Lucia Aniello, best known for her work on Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” vividly remembers how her insatiable appetite for the book series resulted in stacks of free pizza certificates as part of Pizza Hut’s Book It program, which rewarded kids for reading.
Still fresh is Aniello’s memory of lying in the family’s backyard hammock as a kid, reading book after book until the moon nudged the sun away.
Decades after those formative years reading about the plucky, ragtag group of middle-school babysitters in fictional Stoneybrook in the book series launched by author Ann M. Martin in 1986, Aniello and Shukert are now responsible for translating the franchise’s binge-reading power into a TV series for the streaming generation. (Shukert is the showrunner, while Aniello serves as a director and executive producer.)
Released Friday, the 10-episode reboot opens with a modern wink to an origin story as important to some as SpiderMan’s or Batman’s. Sporty seventh grader Kristy Thomas (Sophie Grace) watches as her single mom, Elizabeth (Alicia Silverstone), is in need of a sitter to watch her youngest son. Elizabeth huffs about young people these days being hard to get in touch with, as well as the high fees of internet-based babysitting services: “When I was a kid, my mother would just call some girl in the neighbourhood on a landline,” she says. “And she would answer, because it was part of the social contract.”
Kristy’s great idea is born: a babysitting club.
She enlists her shy bestie Mary Anne Spier (Malia Baker) as secretary, their artistic friend and neighbour Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada) as vicepresident, fashionable new girl from New York City, Stacey McGill (Shay Rudolph) as treasurer and eventually, environmentally conscious California transplant Dawn Schafer (Xochitl Gomez) as an alternate officer.
“When I saw them all together for the first time, that was one of the top five moments of my life,” Shukert says. “Maybe ahead of my wedding, but after having my son.” The way she speaks with reverence about the series, it’s easy to believe she isn’t joking.
That adoration, steeped in childhood memories untouched by the corrosion of time, made for a surreal adaptation process. Shukert says rereading the original book series, which ran until 2000 and has sold more than 180 million copies, she was struck by how she remembered very specific details — like Stacey painting her toenails with pink polish accented by a green dot or Claudia having white tights with plaits all over them. But what came more sharply into focus was how the girls’ environment and experiences shaped how they navigated the world. She points to Kristy as an example.
“She is viewed as being bossy and controlling and has to have all the ideas, and she’s such a leader,” Shukert says. “And then you think about Kristy in a kind of emotional context and she’s this kid whose dad walked out on her when she was, like, six years old and never called her and had no contact with her family. Her mom has done this on her own. And you’re like, of course she’s controlling. She needs to control her environment because her early life lacks a lot of control. I think I sort of didn’t see that as a kid, because why would you?”
In her early 30s when tapped to write the original book series, Martin has watched the literary saga get a Hollywood filter before. HBO had a short-lived adaptation in1990 and there was a 1995 feature film, which starred ’90s all-stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Larisa Oleynik, that grossed less than $10 million (U.S.). Martin said it was important for her to be involved with the Netflix series, story-wise, from the beginning. She read scripts, offering the occasional note. She also visited the show’s set in Vancouver.
“I was just desperate for her approval,” says Shukert. “She’s such a huge figure in the lives of many women my age. It was kind of overwhelming.”
The Netflix series manages to evoke a certain time-capsule quality — it’s infused with the books’ signature sherbet colour palette and the girls’ wardrobe seems yanked straight off the book covers — while also feeling current. Shukert and Aniello felt strongly that the girls should feel like an updated version of their literary counterparts, particularly when they’re using cellphones, without diluting their essence.
“It’s definitely for today’s viewers,” Martin, now 64, says over the phone from her home in upstate New York. “But I think it still retains all the parts of the (book) series that young kids fell in love with 35 years ago. Just listening to the things that the characters care about, looking at the way that they’re dressed, how they interact with each other. It’s my girls.”