Netflix to Reboot ‘Baby-Sitters Club’

After more than 20 years, The Baby-Sitters Club is back in business.

Netflix announced on Thursday plans for a 10-episode television adaptation of Ann M. Martin’s worldwide best-selling book franchise The Baby-Sitters Club, which will be helmed by Rachel Shukert, who has been a writer on Supergirl and GLOW.

Described as a contemporary live-action original series, The Baby-Sitters Club will follow the friendship and babysitting adventures of original characters Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia, and Stacey as they run their local babysitting service in Stoneybrook, Conneticut.

The Baby-Sitters Club was first introduced as a novel in 1986 and quickly expanded to more than 35 books written by Martin until other authors took over. To date, the series has over 200 books licensed in over 20 territories, with more than 180 million copies sold.

“The themes of The Baby-Sitters Club ​still resonate 30 years after the original book series was released, and there has never been a more opportune time to tell an aspirational story about empowering young female entrepreneurs,” Melissa Cobb, vice president of kids and family at Netflix, said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Together with Ann M. Martin and the team at Walden Media, our ambition is to contemporize the storylines and adventures of this iconic group of girlfriends to reflect modern-day issues.”

“I’m amazed that there are so many passionate fans of ​The Baby-Sitters Club​ after all these years, and I’m honored to continue to hear from readers — now grown, who have become writers, editors, teachers, librarians, filmmakers — who say that they see a reflection of themselves in the characters of Kristy and her friends,” she added. “So I’m very excited about the forthcoming series on Netflix, which I hope will inspire a new generation of readers and leaders everywhere.”

This isn’t the first time the series has been translated to the screen. The books were previously adapted for the silver screen in 1990 on HBO with syndication on Nickelodeon and Disney Chanel, and later adapted into a movie, Baby-Sitters Club, that debuted in 1995 and starred Rachael Leigh Cook, Larisa Oleynik and Schuyler Fisk.

In January 2018, rumors sparked that there may be another book-to-series adaptation after Cook shared a photo to Instagram of a reunion with her co-stars. Just months later, in May, it was reported that The Baby-Sitters Club was being packaged for the 2018 TV marketplace.

The reboot, which does not yet have a premiere date, comes from Walden Media and Michael De Luca, who will executive produce with Lucy Kitada and director Lucia Aniello.