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Netflix’s ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Perfectly Marries Nostalgia and the Modern Day
When the writer-producer-director Lucia Aniello thinks about her long relationship with The Baby-Sitters Club books, one thing that she remembers is the nausea. As a girl growing up in western Massachusetts, Aniello absolutely devoured Ann M. Martin’s landmark series, about a group of 13-year-old girls in southern Connecticut who form a neighborhood childcare collective. But her enthusiastic consumption was the problem: All that love had a way of making her physically ill.
WATCHGUIDE: The Baby-Sitters Club
“I remember, very explicitly, being in the back seat of a car and getting sick from reading—but just, like, putting my head out of the window to regain myself so that I could continue to read,” Aniello tells me by phone, a few days before this Friday’s premiere of the 10-episode Netflix program The Baby-Sitters Club, based on Martin’s novels, which Aniello executive produced and directed. “Like, I would push my body to the limit for The Baby-Sitters Club!”
As someone whose own mom was driven to purchase a set of purportedly anti-motion-sickness wristbands, probably from a Sharper Image catalog, so that all my back seat reading (and, OK, Game Boy playing) didn’t cause us to have to pull over, I completely understand. It feels odd, yet it is so utterly ordinary, to realize that one’s most personal memories are actually pretty widespread. All those vivid mental images I have of sitting on bookstore and library floors across central New Jersey, paging through Martin’s work? I was one of millions doing the same. All those times I spent copying the various babysitters’ chapter-opening handwriting styles, or daydreaming about the details of their lives—Kristy’s many brothers! Claudia’s high-ponytail cool vibes!—I thought I was inhaling the books in solitude, but I was never alone.
