The new Babysitters Club show on Netflix

shabbatiscoming

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 9:50 am

Has anyone else watched it? Or your kids watched it?
What do you think?
I was all excited that there was going to be a tv version of my all time favorite books growing up over 30 years ago.
But personally I was disappointed. It was way too modernized in my opinion.

What did you all think, whoever watched it?

Lets_Eat_Pie

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 9:51 am

I loved the books as a kid but haven't watched the series yet.
What parts of the show were modernized? Is the setting updated to the current day?

shabbatiscoming

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 9:53 am

Lets_Eat_Pie wrote:

I loved the books as a kid but haven't watched the series yet.
What parts of the show were modernized? Is the setting updated to the current day?

I wont give it away but yes, they modernize a lot (cell phones for one, and there are a few modern day issues that never cropped up into real life or the books back in the 80s that are in the show - jsut one episode but there)

sequoia

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:11 am

You already know my view.

I enjoyed watching it, but they ruined it.

shabbatiscoming

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:13 am

sequoia wrote:

You already know my view.

I enjoyed watching it, but they ruined it.

Same. You know mine Smile

But I agree, they completely ruined it. I watched it with my daughter half way and then I just let her watch the rest on her own.
Some of the things went over her head and others she knows about. She liked it a lot.

Amarante

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:17 am

This is a show that is intended for children and tweens. I believe the books are updated as well just as Nancy Drew no longer drives a roadster and wears brogues LOL

The series isn't intended to be a period piece. FWIW it has been very well reviewed as bringing it into the present without sacrificing what made in popular for tweens in the 1990's.

https://www.vulture.com/articl......html

The Baby-Sitters Club Is a Welcome Surprise and Utter Delight

Kathryn VanArendonk
June 29, 2020

Say hello to your friends (left to right) Stacey McGill (Shay Rudolph), Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada), Mary Anne Spier (Malia Baker), and Kristy Thomas (Sophie Grace), in Netflix’s The Baby-Sitters Club. Also pictured: Claudia’s secret candy stash. Photo: Kailey Schwerman/Netflix

There was a week this month — one week out of this awful, excruciating spring and summer — when I found myself drawn to one TV show over really anything else in my life. Other shows I needed to watch, deadlines, laundry, feeding my children, all of it was just stuff I had to get done so that I could go back to The Baby-Sitters Club, a Netflix adaptation of the beloved middle-grade book series by Ann M. Martin. Watching the show’s ten episodes, which all drop this Friday, July 3, was the most comforting, delightful stretch of viewing I’ve had in the last few months.

I was dubious about the prospect of adapting the series. Like more than one 9-year-old in 1994, I was obsessed with the books for a brief, intense period of my life. The characters were vivid, distinct, and clearly drawn; their problems were often simple but deeply felt. The world of The Baby-Sitters Club was straightforward and obstacles could usually be overcome — but not always. The protagonists, a band of self-sufficient, thoughtful, middle-school-aged girls (and one boy!) dealt with health crises and upheaval within their families. They were given real responsibilities and sometimes made consequential mistakes. I remember some scenes with intense detail: Claudia breaking her leg, the reveal of Stacey’s secret, Jessi learning ASL so she can babysit for a family with a deaf child, Kristy navigating her parents’ divorce.

So I was worried about an adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club with the same skepticism of anyone who loves something and then learns it’s going to be remade. I worried about casting, and whether the series would fall into the TV trap of making the protagonists seem implausibly old, even when they’re supposed to be 13. The two-decade time jump concerned me; what does The Baby-Sitters Club look like now that all these kids have mobile phones? Mostly, I had trepidation about mood. There’s an almost paradoxical sentiment in it, something like heady, thrilling earnestness. What does that look like onscreen? It would be terrible for the show to be thoughtlessly sweet, but arch detachment would’ve been even worse.

The cast won me over first. In her new TV form, club president Kristy Thomas (Sophie Grace) is authoritative, well intentioned, and a little selfish. Claudia Kishi (Momona Tamada) is optimistic, creative, and a misfit in her own family. Stacey McGill (Shay Rudolph) is sophisticated, self-conscious, and boy crazy. Mary-Anne Spier (Malia Baker) has been rewritten as the mixed-race Black daughter of her uptight white widower father (Marc Evan Jackson). The adult cast is also strong, especially Alicia Silverstone as Kristy’s mom, a first-episode casting reveal that made me gasp in delight. As any book reader knows, eventually the club grows to include other members, most prominently with proto-socialist newcomer Dawn Schafer (Xochitl Gomez). They are fantastic together — a believably middle-school-aged group of friends who are idealistic, loving, deeply feeling, occasionally annoying, sometimes mistaken kids.

It’s not hard to imagine a version of this show that might’ve gotten that part right and still punted on the rest of it, though. There’s a way of imagining the actual work of the club as fairly little, mostly shaped by small-scale pitfalls and unfortunate domestic accidents. They’re just babysitters after all. The dramas of their lives are the kinds of stories too much fiction tends to treat as unimportant, often barely worth depicting: Dawn’s at a client’s house taking care of the kids, and one parent continually comes home over an hour late. A kid gets sick while Mary-Anne cares for her. Kristy doesn’t want to babysit for her soon-to-be stepfather. It’s the kind of stuff that can feel like tiny problems, minor obstacles in the grand scheme of things. As shaped by the show’s executive producer Rachel Shukert, though, The Baby-Sitters Club treats those stories the way they actually feel when you’re in the midst of them. They are huge. They are monumental.

Not all the stories and ideas are small ones either. Claudia’s elderly grandmother has a stroke, one of the plot points I remember very clearly from the books. As in Martin’s originals, the TV show’s Claudia is devastated; she loves her grandmother Mimi, but her parents and older sister don’t understand her at all, and without her grandmother, Claudia feels completely adrift inside her own house. The show follows that story closely, spending time on Claudia’s despair, her feelings of sadness and abandonment. But the TV series adds another layer to the story, one loosely adapted from elsewhere in the books but made much more personal on the show. After her stroke, Mimi loses her facility with English and is thrown back to her youth, repeating words and phrases in a mixture of English and Japanese that Claudia can’t understand. Her older sister, Janine, explains what’s happening — Mimi was in a Japanese internment camp as a child, and is reliving those traumatic memories.

The Netflix Baby-Sitters Club also covers the importance of gender affirmation for transgender kids, the loving but strained relationship between a Black daughter and her white father (especially on the topic of hair), the cruelty of economic inequality, the truly hard work of caring for children, and getting your period. For as gentle and adorable as the show is, believe me when I tell you that The Baby-Sitters Club goes surprisingly hard.

The series is fully committed to its combination of personal teenage trials and important large-scale ideas. It’s so committed, in fact, that by the time the club goes off to summer camp and Dawn and Claudia decide to foment a social uprising in protest of the camp’s unjust access to all the cool extracurriculars, I was thrilled and not at all surprised. It is a vision of The Baby-Sitters Club that smartly updates it for the world of 2020, without also sacrificing the innate warmth and optimism of the original books. The books I read as a kid were formulaic and they absolutely had flaws, but their unmistakable message was that these girls had power, real power and responsibility in their own small, suburban world. I’m so glad to see that theme return in the TV series, and to see it insist that big, universal ideas can be expressed in a lovely, comforting show about a group of girls who take babysitting jobs in their neighborhood.

shabbatiscoming

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:22 am

Amarante wrote:

This is a show that is intended for children and tweens. I believe the books are updated as well just as Nancy Drew no longer drives a roadster and wears brogues LOL

The series isn't intended to be a period piece. FWIW it has been very well reviewed as bringing it into the present without sacrificing what made in popular for tweens in the 1990's.

I didnt read anything about the show before I watched it. Thats why I was disappointed. I thought they were going to make a show about the original books. Its ok. I dont think they had to bring in a few of the modern ideas that they did, but it also got my daughter and I talking about things as well.
As I said, my daughter loved it.
For me, who remembers reading them in the 80s, not so much, but thats fine too Smile

sequoia

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:24 am

Okay, well, that’s this reviewer’s reaction.

Mine was different.

Trans kids, forsooth.... teeny tiny child who thinks he’s a girl because he likes dresses.

Just wear the dresses, dammit.

Dresses don’t make you a “she.”

And the way they acted at camp was idiotic and selfish.

Amarante

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:28 am

shabbatiscoming wrote:

I understand where you're coming from. There are certain iconic stuff from my childhood that I wouldn't want updated.

But your daughter loved it and she was the real target audience. They want to grow the franchise by freshening it for a new generation.

When I was a kid my parents let us buy books at the used bookstore and I would bring home what were old teenage romance novels that were written in the 1950's. The lifestyle was as fantastical to me as Little Women because the kids were dancing to a song called Stardust. It wasn't until years later that I tracked down the song and listened to Hoagy Carmichael LOL

jerusalem90

Mon, Jul 13 2020, 10:43 am

Ugh, I was excited about watching it, but after reading that review it sounds like a propoganda piece -- I'm not even going to watch it.

yo'ma

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 9:52 am

Is anyone really surprised?? 9 out of 10 things that are out now, especially on Netflix are propaganda and SJW’s.

daagahminayin

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 10:13 am

Dawn doesn’t have blonde hair?
Maryanne doesn’t have mousy brown hair?

So much of the books was about how the characters looked (remember the detailed descriptions that got repeated at the beginning of every book along with the origin story). So even though appearances are superficial, it was a big part of my experience of the Babysitter’s Club. I get that they wanted to make the already diverse ethnic backgrounds of the characters even more ethnically diverse, but still...

Yeah, I’m obviously not the intended audience.

dancingqueen

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 10:58 am

Oh no! I also read the books voraciously as a kid, and loved the 1995 movie. My kids are a little young for the series so I was a little tempted to just watch myself for a childhood throwback. 😂

emzod42

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 11:40 am

I guess I'm the outlier because I loved it! I thought it was really well done. They modernized it, but they managed to make a kind of outdated concept make sense. I thought there was enough humor and plotwise to make it interesting for adults nostalgic about the books, and I can definitely see it appealing to today's preteens/tweens. As far as the diversity-related updates, in this day and age, viewers demand and expect that from media and I thought they approached it in a way that was appropriate but didn't distract from the core themes.

zaq

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 4:58 pm

Amarante wrote:

This is a show that is intended for children and tweens. I believe the books are updated as well just as Nancy Drew no longer drives a roadster and wears brogues LOL

Is Nancy Drew even a thing any more or did she and George marry the Hardy Boys and drive off into the sunset?

BetsyTacy

Tue, Jul 14 2020, 6:01 pm

zaq wrote:

Is Nancy Drew even a thing any more or did she and George marry the Hardy Boys and drive off into the sunset?

Wait, did Nancy break up with Ned Nickerson????
(Frightening how fast I was able to remember Ned's last name.)

sequoia

Thu, Jul 16 2020, 5:45 am

So, who thought that people with diabetes turn into actual oranges after reading The Truth About Stacey?

TranquilityAndPeace

Thu, Jul 16 2020, 8:24 am

I don’t think I’m personally interested in watching the show... but this thread made me think: what was it about those softcover books that drew my friends and I to them like a magnet? The library could never keep up with our desire to read about Kristy and Mary Anne and Claudia!

I’m 42... so this goes back a little while!

TranquilityAndPeace

Thu, Jul 16 2020, 8:27 am

And reading this thread, Mary Anne not having moussy brown hair is a huge turnoff!!!

I get the diversity thing. I’m a photographer and created a collage of kids holding their newborns for my studio about 4 years ago when most of my clients were still people in the frum community. And I recently ordered 4 new images to replace parts of that colllage, kids from India, light skinned AA kids, dark skinned AA kids, and a very blond group of siblings for diversity!

jerusalem90

Thu, Jul 16 2020, 8:50 am

I don't mind that they made one character African American, also one could definitely be Hispanic because the modern reality is there is a huge young Hispanic population and a significant AA one, but what makes me not want to watch is the transgender part they threw in.

A lot of kids go through a stage where they'd like to be a different race, but they just know they can't and no one suggests mutilating them for it. A lot of little kids would wonder about being the other gender, maybe go through a stage where they wish they were the other gender, but for the vast majority that stage will come to an end and they'll be adults who are glad they didn't mutilate their genitals.

About the Mixed race girl with the white father -- I have no problem with that, but I'd hope that the part would be written with input from a mixed race woman - preferably with a white dad and black mom just like the character -- and not by a preachy white liberal or a person with two black parents.