Clarissa Was Right About Everything

Clarissa Darling had an alligator in her bedroom, a best friend who climbed through her window instead of using the door, and an absolutely insufferable little brother, and somehow she handled all of it with more composure than most adults I know. Clarissa Explains It All was my Nickelodeon bible—the show that taught me more about how cool girls actually thought and moved through the world than any real-life interaction ever managed. I still catch myself watching old episodes late at night and finding them just as sharp as I remembered.

So the news that Nickelodeon is bringing it back—with Melissa Joan Hart returning, now playing Clarissa as a mother—lands somewhere between exciting and genuinely threatening. The reboot wave has not exactly covered itself in glory. The Gilmore Girls revival was a disaster. Fuller House was aggressively unnecessary. And whoever greenlit the Jersey Shore resurrection deserves to spend eternity explaining that decision to increasingly unimpressed people.

But Clarissa as a mother has something the others didn’t. The original worked because of her voice—that direct, unguarded way of addressing the camera like she was letting you in on something the adults in her life hadn’t figured out yet. If the new version keeps that and shifts the subject to the new absurdities of her life, it might actually hold together. And if it doesn’t, the original is right there. Forty-something episodes of Clarissa Darling still explaining things with the right amount of eye-roll. That’s not nothing.