A Certain Slant of Light

I approached the new Netflix adaptation of The Babysitters Club with some skepticism: what if Netflix had decided to dark-and-grittify yet another one of my childhood favorites? And even if they hadn’t, how could you update the BSC to the modern day?

But the show won me over less than five minutes into the first episode. Rachel Shukert, the showrunner, perfectly captures the feeling of the BSC: the sunny can-do optimism of the series, the earnestness of the characters, but also the fact that they are still very young and sometimes immature and experience all of their emotions intensely.

One of my favorite parts of the BSC books was always the friendships and interpersonal tensions between the sitters - the fact that they don’t relate to each other as an undifferentiated mass, but that, say, Kristy has been Mary Anne’s best friend since forever, and reacts with jealousy when Mary Anne makes friends with Dawn, a reaction that is strengthened by her general hostility to new people.

Not all the relationships between the sitters are quite so fraught, of course, but they do all have different individual relationships with each other - like the moment in episode 9 where Dawn comments to Claudia, “We’ve never really hung out alone before,” and they glance at each other a little uneasily, because they’re not sure they have much in common and now they’re going to be the only two BSC members together in a cabin at camp.

The show preserves these elements of the show, while also updating it for the twenty-first century. One update that struck me as particularly BSC was the episode where Mary Anne sits for a little trans girl: there wasn’t a book about this topic during the original series, but you just know that if trans issues (indeed, LGBTQ+ issues in general) had been considered an appropriate subject for children’s book in the 80s and 90s, there would have been.

Given this sea change in public views, I hold out hope that in some future season the show might give us lesbian Kristy (she looks sooooo bored when the others start talking about boys) and maybe even bi Claudia. If the show keeps adapting the books more or less in order, soon we’re going to hit Claudia and the New Girl, which is all about Claudia’s crush on the new girl... But only time will tell.

The main actresses are all delightful, particularly Momona Tamada as Claudia (but of course I’m biased; Claudia has always been one of my favorites), and Sophie Grace as Kristy, who was not one of my childhood favorites but skyrocketed upward in my estimation during the TV show. Her dislike of change, her barely-veiled hostility toward new people, her tendency toward bossiness: possibly I saw too much of myself in her when I was a child? But now I love her and I want to wrap her up in blankets and also whap her upside the head, sometimes simultaneously.

The parents are also delightful: I particularly like Alicia Silverstone as Kristy’s mother. (The relationship between Kristy and her mom is one of the highlights of the show, IMO.) There’s a wonderful scene where Kristy complains that her mom’s upcoming wedding to Watson is a patriarchal relic:“Are you going to start walking behind him now?” Kristy moans. Her mom rejoins, “Of course. And we want you to start calling me Of Watson from now on.”

All in all, the show is a pitch-perfect recreation of a beloved book series for a new generation. I’m looking forward to as many more seasons as they care to put out. I’m very curious to see whether the BSC will remain in perpetual eighth grade, or if this adaptation will allow them to proceed to high school as the actresses grow up.

I have been trying to write a post about the Baby-Sitter’s Club book Claudia and the New Girl for basically forever, but it’s hard to get started because I have so many FEELINGS because CLAUDIA and ASHLEY and ART, OH MY FEELINGS OMG OMG OMG.

I first read this book when I was not quite eleven (I actually recorded it in my diary, so I have an exact date: June 8, 1999), so the feelings have had a lot of time to build up.

On a subtext scale from one to ten, Claudia and the New Girl is about an eleven. It’s not just that Claudia and Ashley become inseparable best buddies and art brain twins within days of meeting, but that there’s a physical awareness of each other in their actions. Claudia is a visually oriented character anyway, being an artist, and her narration usually includes a bunch of detail about what her friends are wearing, but with Ashley that goes into overdrive.

They first meet when Ashley, the new girl, shows up in Claudia’s English class. She looks, Claudia notes, “fragile and delicate” as she faces her new classmates. Then Ashley sits next to Claudia; and for the rest of the class, Claudia can’t stop glancing at her. On the fourth glance (Claudia’s counting, not me!) Ashley is looking at Claudia, too; and they both snap their eyes back to their papers; but then Claudia looks again, and Ashley is also looking at her.

And this is all before Ashley knows that Claudia is an artist. Ashley, also, is an artist, and it’s a plot point that she’s really only interested in Claudia because of their shared art interest - but no, it started before then; it just goes into overdrive when Ashley shows up in Claudia’s art class.

And she asks to see Claudia’s portfolio! Claudia: “On our first date?”

No, I’m making that up. But Claudia is more or less freaking out of her skin because what if Ashley doesn’t like her work and then Ashley says,“You’re very talented. I hope you know that” and Claudia is all “OMG OMG OMG.”

Claudia gets bad grades and can’t spell, and also has a sister who is a genius, and therefore has an overall pretty low opinion of her IQ. (I can’t remember if this is actually addressed in BSC, but I think you could make a good case that Claudia has dyslexia.) And the people in Claudia’s life tend to reflect this self-assessment; it’s not that Claudia’s BSC friends thinks she’s stupid, but they tend to take her at face value.

Whereas Ashley sees beyond that. She understands that Claudia is actually really smart despite her bad grades, and so when Claudia and Ashley talk, Claudia says things that she would never think to say otherwise - things that strike her as alarmingly smart. And also Ashley really understands about art, which no one else in Claudia’s life really does…

And so Claudia starts blowing off her friends to hang out with Ashley. Her friends are super mad about this, and pro-Ashley though I am, they have a point: Ashley is super intense, and she wants Claudia to commit herself totally to Ashley art - and she just doesn’t get it when Claudia tries to explain that she’s interested in lots of things, her life is very big, and she doesn’t want to give that up.

Ashley: “You’re ruining your career, you know!”

I love Ashley’s intensity. She’s so serious and dedicated, and she seems to be really unable to joke around or make small talk. I think part of it is shyness, but it’s also arrogance: talking to people makes her anxious in part because she thinks (with some justification) that people her age won’t understand her or take her seriously.

And Ashley can’t stand not being taken serious. And finally she meets Claudia, who can talk to her on her level - and then the friendship falls apart...I don’t blame Claudia; Ashley demanded too much. But still, it must have been incredibly hard for Ashley.

So there are good reasons why this didn’t work out when they were thirteen. But I like to think if they met again - maybe in college - if they could get over their knotty history; if Ashley had mellowed a little, insofar as she's capable of mellowing, and Claudia became a little more focused…

They could light up the sky.