The Baby-Sitters Club pulls off a rare feat with its two episodes about social justice: an educational, topical storyline that doesn’t feel uncharacteristically somber or didactic. AshleyFetters writes
Photo: Netflix Like many kids who started reading chapter books in the mid-1990s, I picked up a lot of surprisingly practical knowledge from Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club. I learned from Mallory that dyeing your hair blonde on a beach-vacation whim can turn out disastrously and from Stacey that it can be pretty easily reversed.
In the 1980s and ’90s, sitcoms aimed at teenage and preteen audiences gained a reputation for dealing with the ripped-from-the-headlines issues affecting young people at the time — like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and drunk driving — in hokey, ham-handed special episodes. What often lent these special episodes their characteristic corniness was the conspicuous absence of the humor that viewers tuned in for in the first place.
Dawn, in the original books, is an environmentalist and a health-food enthusiast, so the writers asked themselves: What’s the 2020 equivalent of a hyperprogressive, globally conscious ’90s kid? “There had been discussions the whole season long about how this new iteration of Dawn could be very into social justice. That felt really true, [given] who Dawn has always been in the books, to who she would be now,” said Ariel Karlin, who co-wrote the finale with Aniello.
The scenes between Claudia and Dawn also serve as effective examples of how to meet people where they are, so to speak, in activism contexts. “It’s not a barrier for Claudia that Dawn is using these words that she doesn’t understand, and it’s not a barrier for Dawn that Claudia doesn’t have that same vocabulary,” Karlin said. “They just know that they both have good values, and they’re able to get on the same page.
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