Watch Babysitters Club Free

[Jenni Israelsen]

KristyThomas: Hi, I'm Kristy. I'm the founding member of the Baby-Sitters Club. I don't mean to brag or anything but we're famous, here in Stoneybrook. Everybody knows us. That's because everybody uses us. You call one number, and get connected with seven incredible babysitters. This is Stacey, she's our club treasurer. She's good at keeping track of money, she's also good at spending it. Stace was raised in New York City. Sometimes she thinks she still lives there. That's Mary Anne. When we were little, we used to live next door to each other. She's kind of quiet, kind of serious. Why are we friends? They say opposites attract. Dawn's Mary Anne's stepsister. She grew up in California. Dawn really cares about the environment. Her biggest regret is that she wasn't born on earth day. Claudia's an amazing artist. She's REALLY talented. I mean, do you anybody who can take a fourk and a hammer and turn it into... That? And of course Mallory, she's a junior member of the club. She started her novel when she turned eleven and is determined to finish it by the time she's eleven and a half. Jessi is Mallory's best friend and another junior member of the club. Jessi's motto is ''Why walks when you can dance?''. You know, we're more than just a club. We're friends. Best friends. Nothing could ever change that.

Or at least I didn't until today. I was a little girl in the 90s and early 2000s and I read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies, but somehow this club passed me by completely. I could vaguely tell you the names of the members of the club (though I would have spelled them all wrong), but it didn't even really register with me that it was an actual club of baby-sitters. So when a new series was announced for Netflix, starring Alicia Silverstone and a group of unknown preteens, I paid very little attention. This is not going to be nostalgia for me, I thought.

Then I started hearing nothing but excitement from critic friends and colleagues who had watched it, and I was suddenly intrigued. Incredible reviews started appearing. "The Baby-Sitters Club defies and exceeds expectations," said The New York Times. The Hollywood Reporter said it was " downright among the best shows the streaming platform has produced to date." Everything I had heard was that it was absolutely worth a watch even if the name means nothing to me, nostalgia-wise, and so I watched it.

I ended up watching the entire 10 episode first season in one day, eagerly hitting play over and over again as episodes ended, feeling like I was reliving a part of my childhood I never even had. I wasn't a part of this club as a kid, but I sure am now.

In case you're as out of the loop as I was, The Baby-Sitters Club is about a group of middle school friends who start a literal club called the Baby-Sitters Club. Parents call a single number and are connected with one of the baby-sitters in the club for whatever their needs are, leading to a lot of entertaining scenes of preteens wrangling little kids. But of course, this is a show about more than just baby-sitting.

Kristy's mom (Silverstone) is getting remarried to a really nice and really wealthy man (Marc Feuerstein), and Kristy (Sophie Grace) is struggling with changing her entire lifestyle and possibly losing the close relationship she has with her mom. Mary Anne (Malia Baker), who lost her mom when she was young, is trying to grow up a little bit while her extremely overprotective father (Marc Evan Jackson) is having trouble letting go. Claudia (Momona Tamada) excels at art but struggles with everything else in school. Stacey (Shay Rudolph) is totally boy-crazy and is also trying to manage her diabetes, while Dawn (Xochitl Gomez) is the new girl in school, and is just trying to fit into the club.

The show appears to be set in present day, with Instagram, iPhones, Queer Eye, Lizzo, and even jokes about data being stolen by Russia, but somehow, it also feels like it could have been set 10, 20, 30 years ago. Sometimes it looks like a memory, with muted colors and fashion that's both bold and strangely unspecific, like an idealized idea of what life used to look like and also does still look like. It's the childhood many of us might long to go back to right about now, even if it doesn't actually resemble the one we lived. I didn't grow up in a sleepy Connecticut town (or any town at all, but that's beside the point), but this still feels oddly familiar.

Sure, more often than not I found myself supporting the parents over the kids, but that's an alarming aspect of adulthood I just have to keep getting used to, and did not take away from my enjoyment of the series because these parents are actually great. Even the stern Richard (Jackson) is sympathetic despite the sometimes extreme measures he goes to to protect his daughter, and Silverstone is a wonderful, lovable mom just trying to get her daughter on board with the changes in her life.

One weeknight in July, at the end of a particularly exhausting workday spent monitoring pandemic news and conducting interviews that increasingly felt like therapy sessions for all involved, I sat down on my couch with a glass of wine, turned on the first episode of the Netflix reboot of "The Baby-Sitters Club" and felt, for the first time in weeks, instantly soothed.

I wasn't alone. Though we are objectively too old for this, I have since heard from many of my friends and acquaintances, all professional women in their 30s, that nothing took the pain of life inside a communal trauma away quite like this new version of "The Baby-Sitters Club," with its wholesome depiction of children discovering the benefits of organized labor; its sensitive, nuanced representation of blended families and chronic illness; and Claudia's hidden candy stash, itself a rare pop-cultural portrayal of girls eating for pleasure rather than punishment.

And it's what a lot of pandemic viewing looks like. While upcoming reboots of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" and "A League of Their Own" promise to capitalize on nostalgia, we're already steeped in it, from Netflix's recent addition of '90s shows like "Moesha" and "Sister, Sister" to virtual cast reunions from movies and television of the '90s and early 2000s.

Others have been charming in their casual, relatively unmediated presentation, reflective of a new and altered access to celebrities we have now that our lives exist largely online and Hollywood's machinations have been at least partially disrupted.

In April, "Twin Peaks" stars Kyle MacLachlan and Madchen Amick raised their coffee cups to the show's first episode over Instagram Live (it premiered in 1990), telling jokes and swapping stories about their time working with David Lynch. The same month, "Scandal" star Kerry Washington chatted with former costar Tony Goldwyn, "the pretend love of my life," also on Instagram Live, as Washington filled out the census online.

There's a reason for this, and it's one Stephen Groening, associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Washington, knows well. Groening is the author of "Cinema Beyond Territory: Inflight Entertainment and Atmospheres of Globalization," and if you've read any coverage on the phenomenon of people crying while watching objectively unsad movies on airplanes, it likely draws on Groening's scholarship on the subject.

In many ways, says Groening, our current experience under the conditions of a pandemic is not unlike that of being stuck on an airplane, a place where light action, romantic comedies and family-friendly fare rule the day.

"I think people have low-grade fear of flying, that's why they tend to drink on planes and take sleeping pills ... plus it's just plain irritating," he said. There's also a sense of uncertainty and a loss of control: When you're flying, said Groening, "you're suspended in midair, and you don't know what's going to happen, and so you're always in this space of waiting ... and I feel like we're in that now."

And when the abundance of options afforded by streaming services like Netflix or Hulu (or HBO Max, or Disney+ ...) collides with pandemic-induced decision fatigue, returning to something familiar is one way of making a decision and exercising some measure of control. It also means you know what's going to happen.

That couldn't be truer of "The Baby-Sitters Club," whose characters don't age, and whose storylines and character names (Jackie Rodowsky! Hannie Papadakis! Jessi Ramsey!) can feel ingrained into your brain like old phone numbers if you grew up reading the books.

The July day I started watching "The Baby-Sitters Club," COVID-19 cases seemed to be spiking again. It seemed the country needed an adult. The wholesome world of Stony Brook, Connecticut, with its manageable conflict and baseline kindness and responsible caregivers, felt like a different world, one I had forgotten existed and didn't want to leave.

While I was watching, a friend sent me a message on the video chat app Marco Polo, gushing about the show. She was excited for the girls to go to Camp Moosehead in a storyline she remembered from childhood, she said. Like Groening's nervous flyers, we didn't really know even what the next hours would have in store, but we knew we could count on fictional babysitters attending fictional camp.

When everything else feels chaotic, those small certainties matter. "(P)art of taking control, I think, is saying, 'This is what I'm going to watch,'" says Groening. "'I know it. I know how it's going to end.'"

It's rare to see a TV show dedicate itself so fiercely to the inner lives of young girls. And it's even rarer to see it executed as well as the new Netflix adaptation of The Baby-Sitters Club, which uses its premise to launch a charming collection of characters, brought together ostensibly for business purposes, but reminding us that friendship can create whole new families.

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