Generation BSC: A Baby-Sitters Club Podcast

Mary Anne and Stacey are headed back to Sea City with the Pikes for two weeks to start summer break, "just like last time." (Not like last time - they went during Spring Break in Boy-Crazy Stacey. Talk about some timeline wonkiness!) We discuss the revisiting of a lot of the same plot points and seeing them from Mary Anne's perspective this time and quickly realize she's stretching a bit when she...

Due to the subject matter of Kristy and the Secret of Susan focusing on an autistic child Kristy spends a significant amount of time with, Kate and Lauryn are taking a minute to bring on some great guests that they feel will help make that conversation as sensitive and thoughtful as possible. As a result, this week we're diving into Claudia and the Great Search, where Claudia becomes convinced she...

Kate and Lauryn come back into that mid-bouquet toss cliffhanger and dive right into how great this book is at modeling behavior and teaching lessons related to blending families... until it takes a complete left turn with Dawn’s gaslighting of Mary Anne to scare her out of their shared bedroom (for which there is no comeuppance or lesson learned on Dawn’s part). We realize how much seeing Dawn’s...

Kate and Lauryn are back into the main series following their Super Special detour to a ski lodge with the big, but not so big, wedding event where Richard and Sharon tie the knot in a much more business-like fashion than we (to varying degrees) or Mary Anne would’ve liked. It’s the first of a two-parter dealing with the lead-up to and fallout from the blending of the Spier and Schafer families. W...

It's another super special with another super special guest, Jen Forbes, the host of our spiritual sister podcast, Oof! Right in the Childhood. We discuss our babysitters' school trip to a ski lodge, which is, of course, full of all the antics we've come to expect from a super special. Follow Jen! Instagram and Twitter: @oofmychildhood Follow us! Instagram and Twitter: @generationbsc Contact us! E...

Coming off the drama in Stacey’s life due to her parents’ divorce, Kate and Lauryn are relieved to dive into a fun story that involves a mystery that doesn’t include someone doing something mean to one of our girls (like, for example, any time we see Cokie Mason). Instead, the Baby-Sitters Club and everyone they talk to are invested in solving the mystery laid out in a 100-year-old diary written b...

Life caused some editing snafus, so unfortunately there's no detailed summary of all the ins and outs and on- and off-topic tangents in this episode, but Kate and Lauryn discuss the book where Stacey's parents decide to get divorced and tell Stacey she can decide where to live and Stacey has an existential crisis about said divorce and having to decide where to live before ultimately (and unsurpri...

After the difficult subject matter of our last episode, Kate and Lauryn get a bit of a reprieve with a fluffy story about Stoneybrook’s collective obsession with stardom, Jessi’s audition process for the “practically off-off-Broadway” production of Swan Lake in Stamford, and the arrival of child star, Derek Masters. There’s bullying both of Derek and by Derek (spoiler alert – the superbrat is him,...

Well, we’ve reached the book we’ve been dreading since the beginning, knowing that eventually we’ll have to say goodbye to Mimi with the rest of the BSC, Claudia in particular. It was a tough book to come back to after a break for the holidays that we’d hoped would be a nice opportunity to reset after the shitshow that was 2020, made even more tough when an attempted coup and attack on the Capitol...

We’re back from our recent break with another super special, super long, super guest episode to discuss all things BSC and summer camp! Kate and Lauryn are joined by Alexandra Sommeillan to discuss the BSC’s two-week trip to a problematically named summer camp with about half of Stoneybrook. We first dive into Alexandra’s history with the BSC, her thoughts on representation with the changes to Daw...

Kate and Lauryn were excited to get back to a Mary Anne book, but end up a little frustrated by how out of character she and the rest of the BSC act throughout this book. Basically, Tigger goes missing because Mary Anne can’t be bothered to take him in the house and then she (and the BSC) vacillates between frantic and lackadaisical and not using logic before Mary Anne finally figures out that Log...

Kate and Lauryn kick off this episode with their excitement over Netflix’s renewal of The Baby-Sitters Club series for Season Two (and include some thoughts about potential plotlines and what we hope to see in the second season). Then circling back to the topic at hand, we discuss another pretty great book in the series that delves into what a family really is through Kristy’s examination of her f...

Kate and Lauryn recover from the frustrations they had in their last episode with a much more lighthearted discussion of Dawn on the Coast, where Dawn spends her (two-week?) Spring Break in California visiting her dad and Jeff. We have a fun discussion of the ins and outs of Dawn’s specific California and what “California” meant conceptually in the late 80s vs. now, while also diving into a deeper...

Kate and Lauryn attempt to dive into a conversation on Jessi’s second book where “having a pet” is the obsession du jour, but find themselves discussing an uncomfortably timed election (and seemingly out of nowhere) subplot where Kristy acts uncharacteristically despotic and controlling. What we expected to be mostly a fun light discussion of Jessi’s pet-sitting antics (which, don’t worry, there’s...

Kate and Lauryn are back to basics and regularly-scheduled programming with their discussion of Mallory and the troublesome, terrorizing twins – Marilyn and Carolyn Arnold. Despite the trouble and terror, it’s a light book to ease everyone back into the regular series discussion. Mallory has some significant plot ignorance that causes her to completely forget that her identical triplet brothers ar...

Kate and Lauryn round out their Netflix mini-series with a one-part discussion of the two-part finale of season one! It's our conversation about episodes eight and nine - Hello, Camp Moosehead! Follow us! Instagram and Twitter: @generationbsc Contact us! E-mail: generationbsc@gmail.com Generation BSC logo created by Jordyn Hunter.

The Netflix mini-series continues with Kate and Lauryn’s discussion of Kristy’s Big Day, episode eight of the first season. Edie and Watson’s wedding has arrived and we end up with mixed feelings about this one. In particular, we discuss missing the large-scale babysitting job and last-minute DIY nature of the wedding in the book, the overly fancy and “done” nature of the wedding in the show, and...

The mini-series conversation on the Netflix series continues with Kate and Lauryn's discussion of episode eight of the first season - Boy-Crazy Stacey! Follow us! Instagram and Twitter: @generationbsc Contact us! E-mail: generationbsc@gmail.com Generation BSC logo created by Jordyn Hunter.

Kate and Lauryn keep up the mini-series discussion about the Netflix series with a conversation about episode six of season one, Claudia and Mean Janine, and also delve a little deeper into The Claudia Kishi Club. Follow us! Instagram and Twitter: @generationbsc Contact us! E-mail: generationbsc@gmail.com Generation BSC logo created by Jordyn Hunter.

Kate and Lauryn’s Netflix discussion continues this week with a conversation about Dawn and the Impossible Three, the fifth episode of the first season. It’s another episode that stays pretty true to the plot of the book on which it’s based with an in-depth look at who Dawn is, why she (and her mom) came to Stoneybrook, and just how much she’s willing to do to get into the Baby-Sitters Club. We fo...

Kate and Lauryn jump back into the episode-specific discussions for the summer mini-series to discuss episode four of the Netflix series, Mary Anne Saves the Day. The show does a good job again of hewing close to the plotline of the book of the same name, with some great updates. For example, while a 1980s babysitter might successfully evidence her maturity solely be staying calm and calling 911,...

Kate and Lauryn are joined this week by Anna Nguyen, a PhD student in rhetoric and composition who also uses her Instagram (@whatwouldclaudiawear) to document her own sartorial choices and meta-literary commentary on the Baby-Sitters Club. We discuss Sue Ding’s documentary, The Claudia Kishi Club, and the Netflix series generally and touch on some specifics from the book series as well. In our dis...

Kate and Lauryn continue their summer mini-series and discuss The Truth About Stacey, episode three of the Netflix series. Conceptually, this episode sticks pretty close to the book, with the (thankfully) dropped miracle cure/quack doctor aspect, due in large part to our greater understanding of Type 1 Diabetes in children. The issues with Stacey’s parents now arise from their misunderstood concer...

The Emergency Meetings continue with Kate and Lauryn’s discussion of Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls, episode two of The Baby-Sitters Club on Netflix. Despite the title and general concepts being the same as the second book in the main series, we note that the Phantom Caller concept has been significantly modified and the related Phantom Phone Calls from Trevor Sandbourne and Alan Gray are non...

Kate and Lauryn are back with the first Emergency Meeting episode in their summer mini-series to discuss the (hopefully first) season of The Baby-Sitters Club on Netflix! It’s a revisiting of Kristy’s Great Idea, updated to modern day. We discuss how the themes of the episode compare with those of the book it’s based on and find that this one sticks pretty close in spirit, if not in actual plot. T...