More than 20 years ago, my wife and I fell in love with Nickelodeon television show Clarissa Explains It All. We pretended to watch with our grammar-school-aged son, Zac, but truth be told, we continued to watch it long after he lost interest. Clarissa was everything my spouse Diane wished she was when she was 14: killer fashion sense (Clarissa invented the mismatched-prints-with-Doc-Martens look), confidently smart, opinionated (glib even), and quite capable of defending her strongly held eccentric ideas with fun, quirky logic.
I watched the show for some of those same reasons, but also because growing up fully television-ated in the Golden Age of family sitcoms (Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best), I was utterly fascinated that the show’s originator Mitchell Kriegman and his writing team (including Suzanne Collins, who would later write the Hunger Games books) could repurpose the TV family dynamic so thoroughly. The parents were surreal but functional incompetents, while the children worked triple hard at making things make sense, even if they often reached nutty conclusions. Clarissa had a running commentary on whatever she felt or was thinking, and those thoughts were often more interesting than the sitcom “problems.” Besides, there was Sam, a neighbor boy with a ladder into Clarissa’s bedroom and heart. The innocence of their friendship was matched by the ardor of respect they held each other in — it was unlike anything else on television, and funny to boot.
Diane, a teacher, was so taken with Clarissa’s liberated savvy that she would tell mothers with pubescent girls, “Oh, you should Hulu it and show your child this TV program; the girl character is so great!” She even confesses emulation of Clarissa’s stretch-the-fashion-boundaries sense, though adapted for an age-appropriate look.