Millennials never got to see Nickelodeon’s proposed Clarissa Explains It All reboot, but Melissa Joan Hart wasn’t the biggest fan of the project’s plot line anyway.
“I believe it was that Clarissa is divorced and moving to California with her two kids and living on the beach in California with her aunt,” Hart told Insider in a recent interview. “So I don’t know. It wasn’t my favorite way in.”
Hart, 46, played the eponymous teen of Clarissa Explains It All for the Nick sitcom’s five-season run between 1991 and 1994, before going on to star in the ABC sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the ABC Family comedy Melissa & Joey.
Mark Malabrigo/Nickelodeon
In 2018, Nickelodeon was in early stages of a Clarissa Explains It All reboot, with Hart executive-producing the project alongside series creator Mitchell Kriegman, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But four years later, Hart revealed the project wasn’t going forward.
“Nickelodeon got a new president, and they kind of squashed the whole thing,” she said at the time, per People. “So it was actually in the works, and yeah, it just sort of disappeared. It took like a year to do the contracts, which was the hardest part, and then it just kind of fizzled out. So I don’t think [it will happen].”
In her Insider interview, Hart said she thought it’d be “more fun” to reboot Clarissa than to reboot Sabrina. “Of course, whatever I say, I’m going to piss off half the people,” she said.
“I do feel like Sabrina wrapped up really nicely with her riding off on the motorcycle with Harvey [Nate Richert],” Hart added, referencing Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s 2003 finale. “I think that ending on Sabrina was so iconic that I don’t want to go back and try to recreate that and have another good ending.”
Hart was still in business with Nickelodeon as of last year, however: She voiced Becca Chang, a recurring character on the animated series The Casagrandes.