To be an uncle to a young niece and nephew means having to watch a lot of family-friendly programming, specifically anything on the Disney Channel and DisneyXD. I am certainly not one to judge considering the untold hours of Full House, Boy Meets World, Step by Step and Family Matters I watched as a kid. Despite what our nostalgia-blinded memories suggest, most of those TGIF shows were not what you’d call good TV, and their current Disney counterparts (e.g., Liv and Maddie, Girl Meets World, K.C. Undercover, Best Friends Whenever) are all brighter, bigger, broader and absolutely not made for adults. During one babysitting session, my nephew danced, sang and laughed to his heart’s delight through a truly insipid episode of Jessie while I could merely mutter to myself, “What fresh hell is this?”
Beyond the questionable quality of the shows, the more you watch the Disney Channel and DisneyXD the more you start to notice certain things, like a visitor to a foreign land gradually picking up on the local customs. Also, as you watch the parade of kid/tween programming through adult eyes you inevitably make connections the kids won’t.
1. Reports of the Death of the Traditional Multi-Camera Sitcom Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
The Friends set
At some point along the way in TV history, the multi-camera sitcom, once the dominant force in the land, became a dirty word. Using three cameras on a sound stage with just two or three primary sets and a live audience to provide instant laughter is easily the most cost effective option for producing a sitcom, and CBS still pulls in monster ratings for shows that follow that model, like The Big Bang Theory and Mom. However, every year when the networks announce their development slate they practically apologize if any of the pilots are traditional multi-camera sitcoms. CBS is the only network which actually knows how to launch multi-camera sitcoms anymore, leading many to write the obituary on the format which dates all the way back to I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners.
The Girl Meets World set
Not so fast. For better or worse, the traditional sitcom format has been thriving on The Disney Channel for over a decade now. In fact, all of the live action shows on Disney or DisneyXD are traditional multi-camera laugh track sitcoms. If you disdain treacly sweet moralizing, inane hijinks, laugh tracks telling you what’s supposed to be funny and kid actors who are genetically predisposed to mugging for the camera then, um, maybe you should skip all of the Disney shows. However, stop saying the traditional sticom is dead. It’s alive and…maybe not well, but it’s definitely alive on Disney.
2. Some of These Shows Star People You Actually Recognize
The Disney sitcoms usually have nominal parental figures around, but the kids are clearly the main attraction. The adults, even Cory and Topango in Girl Meets World, are largely incidental.
As such, to play an adult character in a Disney sitcom is often a thankless task, but it’s usually a guarantee of four seasons of steady employment and easy work. So you don’t necessarily pity any of the adults putting in their Disney time, but it’s surprising how many times that job is performed by a character actor you recognize:
Regan Burns and Beth Littleford in Dog with a Blog
Remember Burns from those Enterprise Rent-A-Car commercials, Reno 911 and countless other TV guest appearances? What about Littleford – she was a freakin’ Daily Show correspondent!
Hal Sparks (on the right) in Lab Rats
Sparks was in Queer As Folk, hosted Talk Soup and had that elevator cameo in Spider-Man 2. For the past 4 seasons he played a billionaire genius responsible for several bionic superhuman teenagers.
Leigh Allyn-Baker and Eric Allan Kramer in Good Luck Chuck
Remember Kramer as Little John in Men in Tights, or as the puffy shirt-wearing enforcer for the stripper in American Wedding? He put in his 4 seasons as the patriarch of a family with four children.
Kadeem Hardinson from K.C. Undercover
Hardinson was a series regular for all six seasons of the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World, and since early last year he’s been playing the dad to a teenage daughter who aspires to be an undercover spy just like her parents.
John Henson and Robert Picardo in Austin & Ally
Former Talk Soup host Henson put in his four seasons playing the father in this sitcom about two aspiring teen musicians. Star Trek Voyager‘s Picardo was just a guest star in the pictured episode, but it also serves as a reminder that guest spots across these shows are often filled by people you’d recognize.
Maz Jobrani, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Kristin Chenowith, Kathy Najimy as Jafar, Cruella de Vil, Maleficent and the Snow White Queen in The Descendants
The Descendants was a TV movie, not a full series. However, it is similarly more interested in the kids than the adults, as indicated by its title. Chenowith’s clearly the headliner among the adults, but Jobrani is one of those “that one guy from that one thing types.” Robinson was a series regular in nearly 300 combined episodes of The Steve Harvey Show and The Game, and Najimy was on Veronica’s Closet, and voiced Peggy Hill on King of the Hill for over a decade.
3. Several of the Perky, Young Actresses Will Inevitably Have a Sexy, Image-Shattering Phase of Their Career
As Deadspin explained/joked, “All current Disney Channel stars spend the first 10 years of their childhoods at the Oakwood apartment complex in L.A., forced by their divorced mothers to attend 18 auditions a day or else suffer the lash. As revenge, they spend the majority of their adolescent free time watching the ‘Wrecking Ball; video and furiously scribbling notes.”
Disney manufactures these girls into sell-able commodities with carefully orchestrated squeaky clean images, and once they’re on the other end of the contract they might be desperate to break out of that typecasting. All they have to do is look at the current states of Miley Cyrus and Hillary Duff’s respective careers to see how many more opportunities are waiting for them if they first demand our attention by stripping down.
Not saying that’s right or how society should work. It also only applies to a small number of the actresses who go through the Disney Channel machine. However, to watch a Disney Channel show in a post-Aguilera/Britney Spears/Miley Cyrus/Spring Breakers world is to know that some of these girls are eventually going to do something extreme to shatter their Disney image.
Time will tell if getting a nose ring is the craziest thing Jessie’s Debby Ryan does.
4. Do They All Want to Be Entertainers?
Disney Channel stars singing Frozen’s “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?” together
Similar to the way that every character of note in a superhero movie or TV show is a potential franchise with toy line and comic book possibilities, the kids in these shows are treated like franchisable commodities. For example, the kids in Jessie can do their four seasons, and then spin-off to their own show (Bunkd) without Debby Ryan. The girls (Rowan Blanchard and Sabrina Carpenter) in Girl Meets World can do special Disney Channel Original movies in-between seasons (Invisible Sister for Blanchard, Adventures of Babysitting for Carpenter).
As part of this eye toward franchise possibilities, so many of the shows center on a group of kids who either work in show business (Hannah Montana, Liv and Maddie, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody) or want to (Jessie, Austin & Ally) thus introducing an in-universe reason for why so many of the child actors break out into song. As Deadspin joked, “The reason that every Disney sitcom kid character works in show business is so that YOUR kid will want to work in show business, so that Disney will have a larger pool of child actors to cast in more horrible shows about child actors.”
To be fair, there are also several shows which are more in the TGIF tradition of simple, family sitcom territory (Good Luck Charlie, Girl Meets World, Stuck in the Middle), but even those will find opportunities to let their characters sing if one of their actresses happens to have an album to promote through Disney Radio (like Carpenter’s Eyes Wide Open).
5. They May Not Be Great for Children
Sure. Fine. Whatever. Isn’t that basically the same type of humor that was in the old TGIF shows?
Yeah, but apparently a lot of people think the Disney shows take it too far, and while they might teach kids wholesome lessons they also teach them bad behavior along the way. The blogger’s article was passed around on Facebook over 10,000 times, garnering 600 comments, 64% of which completely agreed with her.
A Deadspin parent joked that the worst of these shows are veritable sass factorizes, “Worst of all, these shows are like AP Sass Lessons for your own children. I don’t have a daughter anymore. I have an animatronic SassBot 3000, capable of rolling its eyes and saying ‘Seriously?’ eight times a seconds.” Furthermore, “any child who watches too many Disney sitcoms inevitably begins to treat life like one giant audition. You’re not a sincere kid. All of your lines are rehearsed. You amp up emotions simply because that seems more fitting for the TV show that is your life.” Neuroscience research actually backs up both the blogger and the Deadspin writer’s anecdotal evidence of a child’s behavior being unduly influenced by prolonged TV exposure.
What are some things I missed? The focus group-driven diversity casting decisions? The painful laugh track? Let me know in the comments.
