Disney Channel’s children’s TV shows were a major cultural touchpoint during the 2000s, with hit TV shows like Hannah Montana and movies like High School Musical, which is all the more impressive considering that it was practically built from the ground up starting in the late 1990s.
It’s hard to overstate the ubiquity of the Disney Channel’s children shows during the 2000s. I never watched these shows because my parents were exceeding suspicious of non-cartoon children’s entertainment when I was a child (I watched High School Musical for the first time last year, for example!), but pretty much everyone I knew was obsessed. Hannah Montana was the elementary school version of the water cooler show. So it was fascinating to have the curtain lifted and get a glimpse of the backrooms in this unauthorized history.
Spencer does a good job of capturing how massive a phenomenon Disney Channel was, but at the same time how unexpected it was – there was certainly a lot of luck involved, not least that many writers for adult multi-camera shows were forced to seek job security with Disney Channel on the heels of the rise of unscripted television and consequently brought their skills along with them.
It was interesting to find the answers to many a question my classmates raised back then, like why popular shows still ended after two seasons (answer: Disney was incredibly, astonishing cheap), where on earth Lalaine went from Lizzy McGuire (answer: massive drama with Hilary Duff), and so on.
However, I did think Spencer spread herself a bit thin, covering half a dozen shows as well as their stars, the background jostling of directors and producers, drama within the Disney corporation, just to name a few. In a fairly short book this means that we don’t get to perform a deep dive into any of them. As a result some issues within Disney are more alluded to than truly discussed. I also wished that there was a bit more discussion of how the work culture changed to work in favor of stars of later Disney TV shows when compared to those featured in this book.