• Yeah, well I have a sense of it now. There’s the...

Yeah, well I have a sense of it now.

There’s the fact that you’re interviewing me about this 20 years later or something. My favorite thing is that, to this day, everywhere I go to pitch a movie or a TV show or a book, there’s always someone 24 to the 30 there. These are the people who are starting to run all the things in the world. As soon as they hear I created Clarissa, they go crazy and revert to being 14-year-olds. Even some of the guys — “You created Clarissa?! — and it’s so much fun for me because I have this instant connection to people, and whatever years have passed vanish in a second, and that’s pretty cool for me.

Especially for those were who were girls at the time, there was finally a show for them. Looking back, you know what Clarissa’s values were and, to me, they were a lot better than what came after — Lizzie McGuire and Miley Cyrus.

Clarissa was smart. She wasn’t trying to be a “star.” Being a star for Clarissa would have been a step down. Her character wasn’t aspiring to be famous in a rock and roll star kind of way. She admired smart people. She admired Madonna, but she admired a scientist, for that matter. She was way more cool than the characters from these other shows.

Clarissa Explains It All’s creator Mitchell Kriegman, replying to a question asked in this Splitsider interview of how he interacts with young people today “who grew up on the show.”