About

Everyone remembers the Boxcar Children books, but no one remembers them very well. This is what I learned as I began writing this parody and casually polling the people in my life. We read them when we were children, and though the specifics fall away with age, the feeling of admiring these four children with a home that was all their own and no adults watching over them. It must be nice to have that kind of freedom, we thought.

Falling squarely into the millennial bracket, it seems my generation is always being told about what we’re ruining, and how much we’re falling short of the baby boomers. The mid-century tale of the Boxcar Children surely proves this: those kids were keeping themselves alive in a train car, taking perverse joy in cooking their own food and furnishing their own home, stepping up and doing what needed to be done to stay alive. Millennials want “participation trophies” for “adulting” and “something about avocado toast.” We’re so much worse, right?

But wait! In the original book, the children are adopted by their grandfather and move into a mansion. From then on, the children live a privileged life where they solve mysteries in their mansion, the memories of wilderness living only kept alive by their boxcar, now a playhouse in the backyard. Their self-made adulthood was, in fact, very short lived.

This series reimagines our favorite overly-self-sufficient  orphans and places them in 2018, overwhelmed and exhausted by modern life. Through their escapades, we learn that “getting away” is not what it seems, and there’s really no such thing as a “simpler time.”

- Julie Pearson, Writer/Director