Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Photo: KAILEY SCHWERMAN/NETFLIX

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Every generation gets 'The Baby-Sitters Club' it deserves

In the year 1989, somewhere between the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the U.S. invasion of Panama, I read 20 "Baby-Sitters Club" books.

I was 8 years old. Id recently had my first culinary experience at a Chilis Bar and Grill. The world was awash with possibility. Also, I shared a bedroom with my sister, who was four years older.

That entire year was an immersion course in things sixth-grade girls liked. Paula Abdul. Janet Jackson. That weird ball-and-chain-like Skip It toy. But her bookshelf was the true gold mine. I read everything on the shelves. "Nancy Drew." "Sweet Valley High." Even something called "Summer of my German Soldier," which I believe was about a 12-year-old girl in Arkansas somehow hiding a WWII POW? And yet, despite the fact that I was aggressively anti-babysitter at the time, I kept coming back to Ann M. Martin's "The Baby-Sitters Club." Perhaps, to steal a phrase from that hip animated cat who apparently dated Paula Abdul, opposites do attract.

Over the course of two months, which is seven weeks longer than it took me to watch the new Netflix series, I read every BSC book my sister had. I learned about Claudia and Mean Janine, who was truly a terrible snitch. I learned that Logan Bruno moved to town from Kentucky and liked Mary Anne, and that Cokie Mason needed to back the foff. I learned that Stoneybrook only features softball teams with alliterative names (Kristys Krushers! Barts Bashers!) and that Betsy Sobak is a prankster who orders gag toys from a place called Squirmys House of Tricks N Jokes, and that Mallory Pike has red hair and like 60 siblings.

For the past 31 years, I've rode hard for "The Baby-Sitters Club" in a manner that, if you didn't know me, you might mistake for irony. But I assure you, friends, my intentions were pure. The stories resonated. The characters felt full. The babysitting hotline business model complete with marketable "Kid Kits" seemed financially sound.

When I heard Netflix had created an updated show based on the books, despite the fact that it came from the executive producer of the fantastic "Broad City," and the showrunner from the equally excellent "GLOW," I was worried. Like anyone whose seminal cultural experiences have remained frozen in nostalgic carbonite, I view remakes and re-imaginings and GI Joe: Rise of Cobra cautiously, like Mary Anne when Cokie Mason is sniffing around Logan.

But over the past few days, Ive watched the entire series alongside my 5-year-old daughter. Im happy to report, fellow BSC Heads, that the Netflix "Baby-Sitters Club" is "The Baby-Sitters Club" we deserve.

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Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

**

The best "kids" entertainment is rooted in an ability to resonate on multiple levels. The ones that do it well the Pixar films, "Calvin and Hobbes," "The Muppet Show" derive their strength from a mix of adult-level jokes and narratives that also work literally. It's why you can watch Calvin go down the hill on his wagon and hear him wax philosophically about the meaning of life, and understand that the wagon represents that journey, or you can just think "godd, look at that kid going down a hill on a wagon."

This sort of narrative tightrope is harder to walk than it may seem, but BSC pulls it off. It layers in meta-references to "Gossip Girl," and winks at Alicia Silverstone's role as Kristy's mother with a crack about her "not being clueless." The first episode even calls back to "Sex and the City," as we see Kristy as Carrie Bradshaw, typing away on an essay about decorum.

Of course, some of my viewpoints have evolved in the past 30 years. For non-example, my 8-year-old self strongly believed that Kristy, always clad in a turtleneck and sweatshirt, was obviously the best and most awesomely dressed babysitter, and now I see that I was extremely correct.

The show has old bones. While the casting, and the themes (Mary Anne corrects adults when they misuse pronouns with a trans kid she babysits), and the shows aesthetics all feel very 2020, there is a nostalgic optimism, a sense of fairness and, to steal from Kristy's essay, decorum that feels so far from the current diaper barge burning on a Cuyahoga River-sized cesspool of snake oil in America that it might as well have been dug up out of a time capsule alongside a package of Snackwell's Devil's Food cookies and a "Did I Do That?" Steve Urkel T-shirt.

The girls in the show still fit the archetypes that Martin created (The athlete! The bookworm! The um, Stacey!) but they all share an old school, almost Midwestern maturity that makes me feel like each pulled a Freaky Friday with former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Take, for example, the third episode, "The Truth About Stacey."

During the episode, they find out, via an ad they watch on an iPad, that they have competition from The Baby-Sitters Agency, which is made up of shy Ayn Rand disciple orange-tinted high school girls. When Stacey tells on a rival babysitter for nearly getting a child killed while she was busy doing hand-stuff with her Goth rapper boyfriend, those high school sbirds pull a Lee Atwater and send around a video of her having a diabetic seizure to all the parents.

Now what does Stacey do about this? Does she kidnap the high schoolers cat and send her collage-style ransom notes with amusing pictures of the cat dressed up in lightly demeaning ways, as would be well within her rights given what just happened? Or, you know, just like email the parents and explain she has diabetes? No, she does not.

Instead, she essentially calls a PRESS CONFERENCE while wearing Melanie Griffiths "Working Girl" get-up and addresses all of the parents in-person. And you know why she does that? Because, unlike pretty much everyone else, the 12-year-olds in "The Baby-Sitters Club" are the adults in the room. And frankly, given how adults act these days, thats kind of condescending to the girls.

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Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

Season one of "The Baby-Sitters Club" is now showing on Netflix.

**Using highly scientific anecdotal research acquired by texting my friends, it seems a new generation of 8-year-olds has latched on to "The Baby-Sitters Club." Nearly everyone I know with kids in the 7 -to 10-year-old quadrant has seen it.

My daughter is 5, and slightly young for the show, but I had her watch it with me anyway, because well, screentime is screentime, you know? She watched for a few minutes and then asked how old the girls were. Twelve, I told her.

Wow, she said. Like most 5-year-olds, its often hard for my daughter to fathom any age beyond 8.

What do you think you can do when youre 12, I ask.

When youre 12, you can do everything, she said, her eyes still on the screen. Anything you want.

And after watching "The Baby-Sitters Club," you know what? I kind of think she might be right.

Kevin Alexander is a freelance journalist and author of "Burn the Ice: The American Culinary Revolution and Its End." Twitter: KAlexander03

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Every generation gets 'The Baby-Sitters Club' it deserves - SFGate