Harriet the Spy, the Kirkus-starred 1964 children’s novel by Louise Fitzhugh, is part of an old, and odd, tradition of books for young readers—loosely structured tales, set in Manhattan, that detail the adventures of precocious young girls with wealthy parents. The Eloise books by Kay Thompson preceded Harriet in the ’50s, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg followed it in 1967. It’s easy to imagine that book editors at the time—many of whom grew up in similar situations—simply found such stories relatable; after all, didn’t everyone grow up with a nanny and a cook?
Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch lives on the Upper East Side and rarely sees her parents, who spend most of their time going to fancy parties and ignoring her. The most important adult in her life is her nanny, called “Ole Golly,” who quotes from great literature and dubiously tells Harriet to remember that “Life is a struggle” as she attends classes at an elite private school.
Harriet has a few friends in class, including budding scientist Janie Gibbs, who sometimes fantasizes about blowing things up, and Simon “Sport” Roque, who cooks, cleans, and pays the bills for his father, a struggling author. But mostly, Harriet is a loner who passes the time observing people around her and writing comments about them in her trusty notebook. She also spies on her neighbors—including a lonely man with about 25 cats, and a bedridden woman who seems to have little motivation in life. Many of the notes that Harriet jots down are rather nasty—particularly regarding her classmates, as when she lists “What to do about Pinky Whitehead,” whom she seems to detest for being socially awkward: “1. Turn the hose on him. 2. Pinch his ears until he screams. 3. Tear his pants off and laugh at him.” She also likens Sport to “an old woman” because he worries about his clearly troubled father.
At one point, Ole Golly advises Harriet to “Remember that writing is to put love into the world,” which one can take as the book’s moral, if one squints. Fitzhugh didn’t always follow this advice herself, though. Over the course of the book, Harriet derisively calls several characters “fat” (including Ole Golly’s mother, whom she likens to bread dough), and she notes that her nanny, when she blushes, “looks exactly like a hawk-nosed Indian” whom she dubs “Big Chief Golly.” Later in the novel, Harriet considers getting back at Sport by calling him a “sissy” and spreading a rumor that that “he reads cook books”—a particularly troubling bit of coded homophobia in a book by a lesbian author.
The new animated series Harriet the Spy keeps the book’s 1964 setting and several characters, but it’s a much kinder and gentler version of the tale. It features Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein as the voice of Harriet and Glee’s Jane Lynch as Ole Golly, and premieres on Apple TV+ on Nov 19.
The new show offers a loose adaptation of the novel; for one, it concentrates more on Harriet’s adventures at school (or, in one case, at a dance class), than it does on the amateur spying that inspired the book’s title. To be fair, it’s tough to make a dynamic kids’ show about a girl spending time writing things in a notebook. As a result, the cartoon version of Harriet is far less passive; she takes it upon herself to try and improve the lives of those she spies on, with the help of Janie and Sport, who are even more thinly developed here; even Old Golly’s appearances are scaled back. In one episode, Harriet encourages the bedridden woman to open her own store, and in another, she cat sits for the lonely man before reuniting him with his estranged brother. Indeed, she rarely has an unkind word to say about anyone. (In the book, Harriet is content to call the woman “boring” and to reflect on how she’d live her life differently than the man does; she wouldn’t want “all those cats,” she decides. “I might even like a dog.” She’s certainly not interested in interacting with either of these people—they’re just notebook fodder to her.)
The show, co-written by The Adventures of Pete and Pete co-creator Will McRobb, seems uninterested in being faithful to the book at all, except in broad strokes. Even its art style, which gestures vaguely toward that of Fitzhugh’s illustrations, feels lifeless and bland. In the end, it’s just another ordinary cartoon about the power of teamwork and friendship, and one wonders if the only thing that the makers were interested in was Harriet the Spy’s name recognition. In any case, there are far more imaginative animated series about precocious young girls out there—Netflix’s Hilda, based on the graphic novel series by Luke Pearson, comes to mind. It not only features a curious and empathetic main character, but a charming, brand-new fantasy world, to boot.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
