The 2 big reasons ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ endures, according to Netflix creator Rachel Shukert

A birthday present changed Rachel Shukert’s life.

Shukert was eight years old when she got her first “The Baby-Sitters Club” book as a gift from a classmate. She remembers that it was “The Ghost at Dawn’s House,” the ninth installment in author Ann M. Martin’s wildly popular Scholastic children’s series about a diverse group of pre-teens and teenage friends who start a babysitting service in the fictional town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut.

Related: 5 ‘Baby-Sitters Club’ books Netflix showrunner Rachel Shukert recommends

The book left its mark: These days, Shukert is the creator, showrunner and executive producer of Netflix’s “The Baby-Sitter’s Club” streaming series, but at the time, she was unaware of the mania surrounding the series, which got started in 1986, and set it aside until she’d run out of other books to read.

“I picked it up like, ‘Oh, I guess I’ll give this a shot,’” Shukert recalled during a recent phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I was immediately hooked. I felt like I had known these girls, the babysitters, my whole life and I wanted so much to be a part of Stoneybrook. I had to go back and read books one through eight and all of a sudden it was like everyone was reading them at the same time — like they hit my class in critical mass.”

Shukert, who grew up in Nebraska before moving to attend New York University, went on to write the memoirs “Everything is Going to Be Great” and “Have You No Shame?” and several novels. After moving to Los Angeles to work as a screenwriter, she’s worked on shows like “Glow” and “Supergirl.” And now she oversees “The Baby-Sitters Club” on Netflix, which just premiered its second season in October.

While the books were written in the mid-’80s and continued to be published through 2000 (with ghostwriters taking over after Martin wrote the first 35 books in the series), Shukert saw the potential and opportunity to reintroduce these characters to a new generation.

“I think there are two things that make these books so enduring and so appealing to generations of readers,” she said. “A huge part of it is just the friendship. Everyone can see themselves in one of the girls and everyone has their favorite. I feel like the friendship is both really aspirational, but also really relatable.

“I think the second thing is that, especially for girls who maybe feel unnoticed, dismissed or are told that their interests don’t matter as much or are less important than the stuff boys are into, the fact that these girls are running their own business and they are treated with this sort of incredible seriousness by their community is huge. They’re trusted members of this care-taking club and adults ask for and respect their opinions and that’s extremely attractive and powerful for young readers.”

Shukert also got to fulfill one of her lifelong dreams of actually meeting and working alongside the series author.

“After I stopped crying, I got to talk to her,” she said with a laugh, recalling her first phone conversation with Martin. “She has been so supportive of everything we wanted to do with the show. From the beginning, she was very much like, ‘I want to push this in as many directions as we can and I would love for you to kind of progress these identities like I tried to do at the time.’ She was really all for it.”

Though the books are about these young entrepreneurs, their varied personalities, upbringings and their many adventures — and misadventures — in babysitting, the novels also dealt with serious issues such as race, economic disparity and grieving the loss of a loved one. Shukert said those were key elements that stood out to her even early on that she wanted to include and even update in the TV series to be even more inclusive and introduce LGBTQ+ characters as well.

“I think it’s important to kind of push forward and be able to see people that look like you and are like you [on TV and in film], and at the same time realize that we are all more than just the identities that other people see when they look at us,” she said. “We have these outward-facing identities, but there’s also the fact that you’re just a person.”

During the pandemic, Shukert was on lockdown at home with the rest of the world, trying to concentrate and write for the second season of the show and tend to her curious four-year-old son, Theo. She noted that she’s moved away from writing novels for now because she’s enjoying the collaborative effort of writing for television.

“I really love working with other people and feel like I’m the most creative in groups and I feed off of other people’s energy,” she said. “I do my best thinking and idea-ing out loud in conversations with others, so that part is really fun for me. I love that process. We’re all getting to work on our own show and I get to work in all aspects of production with these other fun, cool and creative people at the top of their game. I love seeing what the actresses on the show bring to it, what the designers bring and the directors bring to it. The whole process is just exciting.”

It was also announced that Shukert has been added on as an executive producer for the forthcoming fifth season of the hit Hulu TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood.

“It’s incredible to be a part of something that has been such a phenomenon,” she said, while not sharing any other information specific to the new season. “I feel like the series is just everywhere and has become such a shorthand for people about like what they feel is going on with all of these injustices in a really powerful way. It’s a symbolic show and it’s so exciting to be a part of something that has that kind of reach and it means so much to so many people.”