Hey Now, Disney+
EMILIE: Yes, we’re behind on the blog posts, but our hands are dry from excessive hand-washing and the virtual happy hours have us forgetting what day it is (I want to say it ends in “day”).
How have you all been holding up? For us, it’s been a lot of sitting around, trying our best at online workouts, and walks around the neighborhood (while practicing social distancing) to remember what time of the day it is. Our lives have been dictated by a series of Zoom links: one link to join the workout, another for a meeting, and a final few for the back-to-back virtual happy hours with friends. This week I (Emilie) got a lot of laughs during a work meeting when I used a photo of Joe Exotic with a tiger as my virtual background, and placed my body so that it was in front of the tiger. I also watched a video on Instagram where our lord and savior Ina Garten posted on Instagram at 9:30 AM where she made a giant Cosmopolitan cocktail. If Ina says it’s okay to drink at that time, then I guess we all get a pass?
I could go on telling you all more about my new lifestyle, but it would be embarrassing. You know what else is embarrassing? Middle school. The two years (or three years, depending on where you grew up) that you prefer to never acknowledge (or have had to rather painfully on a therapist’s couch). Has anyone ever met someone that had a good time in middle school? If so, they’re lying or they were the bully. Back in the early 2000s, Freaks and Geeks was the closest we had gotten to seeing a realistic portrayal of middle school life. Luckily, on January 12, 2001, a show premiered that actually centered around a middle schooler whose life was average and who wasn’t popular or the best student or athlete in the class. That show was Lizzie McGuire.
Lizzie McGuire was Disney’s first bonafide TV hit. For a time, it defined the channel, and thanks to its popularity in the emerging tween demographic, it also became a pop culture phenomenon. Today we’re well aware of the spending power tweens have (they account for about $200 billion in the US each year), but back then, the market had been primarily split into children and teenagers, and nothing really in between. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, there’s a shift in marketing and a surge in products, media, and stores targeting tweens, and in particular pre-teen girls. Limited Too, the Olsen Twin direct-to-video empire, Claire’s, and, of course, Lizzie McGuire That’s So Raven, and several other Disney Channel shows).
A lot of these once-popular things are experiencing a resurgence thanks to our nostalgia-loving culture, so, in an age of reboot madness, Disney, when announcing their new streaming service — cause we are also in a streaming war — concurrently announced a slate of shows and questionable live action movies, with Lizzie McGuire being the only one that mattered.
THE TIMELINE
In August of 2019, at the D23 Expo (Disney’s annual expo where they announce all their major movies, TV shows, parks and attractions, etc.), the then soon-to-be-launched Disney+’s lineup of original, exclusive to the streaming service, was confirmed. This included The Mandalorian, The Lady and the Tramp live-action movie (seriously, why does every Disney movie need a live-action re-boot? Why do any Disney movies need live-action reboots?), and that Obi-Wan Kenobi show that’s starring Ewan McGregor. Then, the announcement that launched a million shrieks from women born between the years of 1986–1992. A reboot of Lizzie McGuire! Hilary Duff was at the D23 Expo to introduce the reboot, saying, “Lizzie has also grown up, she’s older, she’s wiser, she has a much bigger shoe budget.”
We’ve never received more texts in a single day besides birthdays and other important milestones.
Duff later confirmed the reboot on her Instagram with a post that aptly ended with the hashtag #bringbackbutterflyclips. As you all know, ya girls are big fans:
As we began to do heavy research on just how many people were allowed per Disney+ account, development began on the show. Every Tweet and Instagram post from Hilary Duff and Disney+’s accounts would cause our Twitter feeds to go crazy and for us to actually think, “hey, this might actually be a good reboot!”
As you might remember in our second-ever podcast episode, we took a deep dive into a lot of the reboots from this past decade. A lot of them weren’t great because they didn’t do enough to evolve with the times and some just never needed to be made in the first place. Lizzie McGuire felt different, though. Hilary Duff’s emphasis on ensuring this show would accurately portray an unmarried 30-something’s life was promising, like Disney might not try and turn this into a G-rated sham. Even our fave Lizzo wanted to be a part of it!
The first signs that the show was underway came in late October of 2019, when Duff posted a photo with her TV family Hallie Todd, Jake Thomas, and Robert Carradine on the set with a copy of the first episode’s script.
She was later seen that month filming the first episode in Washington Square Park.
It was exciting to see the whole McGuire family reprising their roles, and to have Terri Minsky be the revival’s showrunner, since she was the original show’s creator and showrunner. They even got Gordo!
Adam Lamberg came out of acting retirement (he was almost 20 when the show ended and he went to NYU and left acting afterwards) to reprise his role as Lizzie’s best friend from middle school.
Noticeably absent was Lalaine, who played Lizzie’s other best friend Miranda. You may remember she’s not in the original show’s final episodes and doesn’t appear in the movie (family’s Mexico trip was the excuse), so I’m not sure if they planned to bring her back for this reboot. In real life, while the original show was airing, Lalaine left because she was busy filming other Disney projects and touring in Australia and New Zealand as part of the Radio Disney tour circuit. She would later be a part of the pilot Stevie Sanchez, which was a potential spinoff to Lizzie McGuire. The show’s plot centered around Miranda Sanchez’s little sister Stevie Sanchez, played by SELENA FUCKING GOMEZ!
Unfortunately, Lalaine pled guilty to possession of crystal meth in 2007 but sought treatment and has been sober since. Apart from a 30-second scene in the movie Easy A about 10 years ago, but hasn’t done much mainstream acting since then, but she was on Christy Carlson Romano’s YouTube cooking show last year?
After shooting two episodes, it was announced in January of 2020 that Minsky had left the show due to “creative differences.” Variety would later report that Disney had abruptly fired Minsky while Duff was on her honeymoon; that move came across as strategic since it’s well known Duff and Minsky have a close working relationship. The show entered hiatus in January of 2020, when it was reported that when Minsky was fired, and dribs and drabs of official statements and gossip have come out as to what sent the show off the rails.
Even in the week we researched and wrote up our notes on this episode, three NEW pieces of info came out.
- Hilary Duff finally addressed the show via Instagram stories, where she expressed that she wanted the show to go to Hulu, since the content was not “family friendly” enough for Disney+. Since Disney of course owns Hulu, it had been announced that the Love, Simon show (titled Love, Victor), as well as the High Fidelity show adaptation starring Zoe Kravitz (which premiered in February) were moving from Disney+ to there. This was done because, like the Lizzie McGuire reboot, these shows weren’t deemed family friendly enough for their viewers.
- The official plot of the new Lizzie McGuire show was revealed. Fifteen years later, Lizzie is turning 30 years old and living in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York City. Lizzie works as an apprentice to an interior decorator, and is engaged to a man who owns a restaurant in SoHo, Manhattan. When certain events take place at the end of the first episode, Lizzie is forced to leave Brooklyn and return to Los Angeles.
- The first episode featured: sex (gasp!), and cheating.
When she signed on, Duff gave a good quote that could’ve told Disney that Lizzie is all grown up. She said: “For me, coming back when she’s 30 and she’s not in a marriage, and she’s not having a baby, and she’s not doing all the things that I have already done in my life — that story is really exciting for me. I think to myself, “Where can we go? What are the struggles of a 30 year-old right now? What are the pressures that life throws in front of a woman who is 30 and doesn’t have all those things yet?”
But, apparently for Disney, to have a show centered around a woman in your 30s, and not married with kids — ESPECIALLY if you’re cheating, is not family friendly. Fair. But what did you expect? Not everything could and should fit into Disney’s sanitized reality. But because they now own so much IP, great scripts and concepts will never see the light of day. They control too much and are ultimately hampering originality and creativity, in addition to ruining the legacies of the IP they have and have acquired (looking at you, new Star Wars trilogy).
So what does the future hold for this reboot? As of now (April 1), nothing new. I have low-key Googled it on an almost weekly basis, hoping for some development. At this point, I should probably set up a Google Alert.
I’ve revisited a few things here and there on Disney+, including some original Lizzie McGuire episodes. One show I won’t be revisiting, thanks to a recent viewing of the movie Honey Boy, is Even Stevens. After you know why Shia LaBoeuf always flared his nostrils while playing Louis, you’re kind of left heartbroken.
I only have free Disney+ because I’m on a Verizon unlimited family plan, but Margaux was legit going to get it for this reboot. Instead, we’re now left never wanting to watch a show where they’ve fired the creator, who is an extremely talented and thoughtful writer (she’s won fucking Emmys and Peabodys) and won’t accept a watered version of grown up Lizzie. Ultimately, it feels like Duff’s current show, Younger, feels like the closest we’ll get to an accurate portrayal of Lizzie McGuire’s life in New York.
When Hilary Duff released her statement regarding the show, it effectively said, “Lizzie gonna catch some dick on this program or I’m not doing it”, and we stand in solidarity with her. This one article in The Cut said it best with its article’s title: “Let Lizzie McGuire Do Sex.”
A bumper sticker we can all get behind, butterfly clips and all.
