Netflix has announced a premiere date of July 3 and released a trailer for its 10-episode TV-series reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. It’s based on a series of middle-grade books, published mainly between 1986 and 2000 and written by Ann M. Martin and multiple ghostwriters.
The books were previously adapted as a short-lived HBO show in 1990 and as a 1995 feature film. Like those versions, the new show follows a group of middle schoolers—Kristy Thomas, Mary-Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, Stacey McGill, and Dawn Schafer—who start their own babysitting business in suburban Stoneybrook, Connecticut. (They’ll be portrayed by child actors Sophie Grace, Malia Baker, Momona Tamada, Shay Rudolph, and Xochitl Gomez, respectively.) Clueless’ Alicia Silverstone will play Kristy’s single mother.
Lucia Aniello, an executive producer of the Comedy Central show Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, will serve as an executive producer and director for the new series, and Rachel Shukert, a former co-producer of the Netflix series Glow, will be its showrunner.
In 2010, Martin published a prequel to her series, The Baby-Sitters Club: The Summer Before, and Kirkus’ review noted that young girls “will identify with at least one of the characters as closely as their mothers did.” The new show seems to have similar goals in mind; Shukert told Entertainment Weekly that she aims to update the book series for modern audiences: “Who is Dawn, somebody who was a vegetarian and paved the way for that in the ’80s? Now we’re at this time where she might be somebody with a real social justice bent, an activist about the environment and about income inequality and stuff like that.”
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
