Shay Rudolph

In The Baby-Sitters Club (2020), Shay Rudolph’s Stacey McGill belongs to the group without becoming interchangeable with the other girls. She has the poise of a teenager who knows how she wants to come across, but the confidence does not rule out uncertainty. That is a useful balance for a programme in which each girl needs to be recognisable in her own right. We like Rudolph here because she can establish a personality without making the friendship feel secondary.

Her early television work included Maya Flynn in Lethal Weapon (2018–2019), before Stacey became her breakthrough role. Here she works alongside Sophie Grace’s Kristy Thomas, Momona Tamada’s Claudia Kishi and Malia Baker’s Mary Anne Spier, with none of them merely filling a space in the group. We warmed to them more quickly than we expected because their attention to one another made each friendship seem important. It is the kind of acting that can be overlooked precisely because the company looks so comfortable.

Rachel Shukert’s adaptation gives these performances room, treating children’s friendships as worthy of close attention. The cast repay that care by keeping the writing from sounding like a succession of lessons, a considerable virtue in a programme with such a reassuring manner. That reassurance is also our reservation: it sometimes limits the drama. We would like to see Rudolph in material that makes the people around her harder to get along with, rather than assume that an agreeable group is the only place she can work.

The subsequent work includes Emma Diehl, opposite Greg Kinnear and Isla Fisher, in the family comedy The Present (2024). She also plays Virginia in The Sex Lives of College Girls (2024). The college setting takes her beyond the younger friendships of Stacey’s world, though the ensemble remains familiar territory. Those credits broaden the settings, but our recommendation rests on Stacey. Start with The Baby-Sitters Club; there is pleasure in watching actors make room for one another.