Netflix's 'Baby-Sitters Club' Review: This Reboot Will Make Any ’90s Girl—And Her Daughter—Proud

In Martin’s cult-classic paperbacks, the girls all have one thing in common, despite differences in personality, ideology, class, and ethnicity: They love taking care of children. In the newest adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club (BSC, to fans), the girls are still individuals, and they’re still great with kids—but what they really have in common is that each one has a broken relationship with one or both parents. 

“My dad left me,” Kristy says, tearfully, and there’s no sugarcoating it—he really left her, her three brothers, and their single mom, played by Silverstone. Mary-Anne’s mom is dead, and grief has made her dad distant and controlling. Claudia’s parents just don’t seem to understand her, or even to like her, the way they do her sister Janine (Aya Furukawa, laugh-out-loud funny), who spends her free time correcting grammar on Reddit. Even rich, beautiful Stacey has legitimate fears that her parents are ashamed of her.

Maybe I’m taking too much of an I-read-every-Babysitters-Club-book-as-a-child-and-then-got-an-English-major approach here, but the young women of the BSC make themselves into part-time parents to fulfill their dreams of the families they wish they had. “That’s when I realized,” says Claudia near the end of an episode about mysterious phone calls. “No matter who your parents are, they could always make you feel like you’re letting them down. And that feeling—the one that makes you feel sad and scared and not good enough—that’s the real phantom caller.”

In the world of Stony Brook, Connecticut, parents can never be fully trusted. It’s safe to believe only in your friends and yourself. And the world the girls create together, in the brief period in which they are interested in both playing with dolls and going on dates, is magical: the outfits Claudia and Stacey wear to Kristy’s mom’s wedding, so gorgeous they made me feel physically ill; Kristy, reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu to take down a rival babysitting group; the babysitting charge who throws a wake for her dead doll. (“Should we say a prayer?” “Krakatoa was an atheist.”)

The show builds to a satisfying height in the last two episodes, when the BSC goes to the last true bastion where children-taking-care-of-children is accepted: summer camp. Mary-Anne—who in the book is white and annoyingly demure—is rewritten in this series as a biracial Black girl who always stayed quiet but finally has something to say. She throws herself into directing the camp musical, but her plans clash with Claudia and Dawn when those two plan a giant protest to stop the shoddily run camp from discriminating against poorer campers. “It’s socioeconomic stratification. It’s creating haves and have-nots in what’s supposed to be a utopian environment,” insist Dawn and Claudia, proposing a strike after poorer campers are shut out of pricey activities. But their activism inhibits Mary-Anne’s opportunity to finally be a leader as the director of the musical.