Who Are All These Childhood Reboots For?
I never once asked to know the fate of the Zoey 101 or iCarly couples
Unlike The O.C.’s Mischa Barton who posts screenshots of the Wordle answer on Instagram for no apparent reason, I do worry about giving you spoilers. So a heads up that this has very light spoilers for Zoey 102 — a movie I watched so that you don’t actually have to, but still.
There’s an important scene towards the end of Zoey 102, a reboot of Nickelodeon's popular Zoey 101, with a setting that feels symbolic of the overall film: a decrepit, eerily empty version of Pacific Coast Academy (PCA), the boarding school Zoey and her friends attended back in the early 2000s.
The school had been closed years earlier due to fraud and administrative negligence — a joke that could actually be funny to the adults who, as children, watched Zoey and her friends attend a school with hardly any actual schooling. (The students spent most of their time hitting up the on-campus sushi restaurant, playing basketball, breaking up, making up and pretending to do homework on their Pear laptops.)
That the home of the original show is now little more than crumbling buildings and the ghost of students' past feels right for a reboot that’s trying to recapture the lightning in a bottle of the original show all about teenage freedom — something that seemed ideal and unattainable to us when we were viewers, and means nothing to us now. This is all encapsulated by one line Zoey’s colleague says to her as she’s preparing to go to her high school friends’ wedding: “It's really gross how often you talk about high school.”
Of course, the Zoey 101 reboot creators aren’t alone in their attempts to launch reboots for all the shows tweens loved back when George W. Bush was president. The iCarly reboot on Paramount Plus has already done three seasons. That’s So Raven actors Raven-Symoné and Anneliese van der Pol now star in Raven’s Home. A Lizzie McGuire reboot was in the works before it was scrapped because Hilary Duff and Disney+ couldn’t agree on how mature to portray a now-30-year-old Lizzie, according to Duff. Perhaps a Lizzie McGuire-How I Met Your Father crossover was the solution (I’m kidding, Hulu, please for the love of god don’t get any ideas).
These projects gaining traction makes sense. We’re dealing with a society-wide nostalgia evidenced by the facts that Suits and Ugly Betty are trending on Netflix, Y2K fashion is back, and I, a 28 year old, teared up listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s song “Teenage Dream” which is famously about how hard it is to be 19. But there is a difference between feeling fondness for the past and actually needing to know that Carly Shay and Freddie Benson from iCarly got together — something I never once cared about, which is news to my Instagram algorithm that’s constantly forcing me to watch #Creddie edits against my will.
Childhood shows are unique in that they only enthrall us for a small portion of our lives before we outgrow them. I can go back and watch a show I loved when I was a teenager like One Tree Hill, but I can’t now enjoy a Disney/Nick/Cartoon Network show I originally watched when I was an actual child (unless of course it’s for research). The magic of a childhood show is that when it ends, you and the characters are on the same journey to an uncertain adulthood. I don’t want to know what happens when life catches up to them.
In other words, never once in my 15 years since Zoey 101 went off air did I think to myself hmmm I wonder what Zoey Brooks is doing career-wise and if she’s still with Chase Matthews. But now, thanks to Paramount Plus, I know — and it ain’t pretty! Zoey is a 32-year-old reality TV producer working on a Bachelor-like show, which sounds like a horror story on its own if you ask me but it gets worse. She’s still hung up on Chase Matthews from high school… Chase Matthews from high school! I know this was around the time Seth Cohen was popularizing the hot geek trope but Chase just wasn’t it, I’m so sorry to say. He ran into a metal pole one too many times. However, somehow Zoey has been thinking about him since they broke up after their high school graduation — so much so that she has become a shut-in who hardly sees any of her friends for fear of running into him. Again, all this is for Chase Matthews… just wanted to reiterate that.
The character feels inauthentic, since Zoey was always a confident go-getter and a really good friend, but that’s also why she’s so scary: She’s reflecting back the fear that perhaps, the best years of our lives are behind us. It’s also a reminder that we’re living in a different world than we were when we were perfecting our side parts and begging our parents for Heelys. Zoey 101 was created by long-time Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider who was once so known for shows like Victorious and Drake & Josh that the New York Times nicknamed him the “Norman Lear of children’s television.” Today, he’s best-known for allegations of sexualizing his teenage stars and being a bully on set. Alexa Nichols, who played Zoey’s roommate and best friend during the show’s first two years, has spoken out several times about how bad of a time she had on set thanks in part to Schneider and Jamie Lynn Spears, who played Zoey. Chris Massey, who portrayed funny guy Michael, was arrested for domestic violence in 2016. And to top it all off, Spears has become somewhat of a public enemy no. 1 amid all the information that has come out about her older sister Britney Spears’ conservatorship — and Britney’s insinuations that Jamie Lynn knew about Britney’s mistreatment and kept quiet for her own benefit.
The fact that Zoey 101 is now probably most remembered for its post-show scandals is not unique, but it does make enjoying a light reboot more difficult. And perhaps what makes it even more challenging to watch is that we only get reboots from actors who didn’t achieve the Hollywood dream of ascending to the top. In other words, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a Victorious reboot starring Ariana Grande, Wizards of Waverly Place 2.01 with Selena Gomez or a reimagined Shake It Up with Zendaya. Even in the reboots we do see, there are very clear absences, like Matthew Gray Gubler from Criminal Minds: Evolution, the Olsen twins from Fuller House and even Victoria Justice from Zoey 102. She’s busy singing, dammit. And while many of these actors are doing cool lesser-known projects, it still made me physically ill seeing the cast of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide’s very bitter TikTok after the Zoey cast got their reboot, as well as a Change.org petition for a Ned’s revival.
While watching Zoey 102, I kept asking myself who these childhood reboots are actually for. I may be simplifying it but there seem to only be two options: a brand new generation of viewers who never saw the original, or the original viewers with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. There are examples of the former working at least enough to get multiple seasons, like the That’s So Raven reboot which hinges on the introduction of new teens just as much as OG actors Raven-Symoné and Anneliese van der Pol, and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which went with a brand new cast to garner a younger audience. But a childhood show reboot is a hard sell, since children of today are growing up in a much different world with a plethora of fresh shows that appeal more to their worldview.
When it comes to nostalgic older viewers, there has to be a whole lot of love for the original to get us to pay attention to characters or a premise we enjoyed for a few years before outgrowing them decades ago. But even shows that have huge followings like Gilmore Girls and Gossip Girl couldn’t garner the reboot attention at the same level of the originals. Perhaps we don’t actually want to go back to places like Stars Hollow and Constance Billard for more than a few hours spent rewatching the OGs.
A character’s future created by a writers’ room is never going to be as good as the future we could give them in our imaginations. But also, as adults, we’re not really thinking about their futures at all. Some aspects of culture are meant to grow up with us, like Taylor Swift’s discography and Sex and The City’s And Just Like That, which is flawed but also explores women’s lives when they’re an age that television usually ignores. There are also aspects of childhood entertainment we have greater appreciation for as we age, like how this Lemonade Mouth scene shows Bridgit Mendler could be an Oscar-worthy actress if she wasn’t busy at Harvard or whatever.
But Dan Schneider shows and their counterparts served their purpose to us as kids, and they don’t have a place in our lives now. They’re like childhood friends we love but eventually let go.
B Plot
Question: Whose a character who deserved worse?
Mallika: The correct answer is probably a major villain like Joffrey from Game of Thrones, but they tend to get what’s coming to them so I’ll go with someone who simply managed to be one of the most irritating people to grace our screens: Will Schuester from Glee. In an alternate universe that man was arrested episode one for watching Finn — a high schooler — sing in the showers and we never had to see him again.
Rachel: Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer of course! If you ask me, Xander, one third of the main trio of Scoobies, invented the nice guy trope. He never fully let go of his crush on Buffy, acting with bitterness towards all of her relationships, sometimes to the point of inadvertently sending one of them to hell. He makes everything about himself and what he doesn’t have, somehow manages to bag all of the hottest women and never appreciates them like he should. He is a Joss Whedon insert and it shows! But it’s of course for this reason that he becomes the emotional heart of the show, and compared to what happens to Willow and Buffy throughout the series, he gets off way, way easy. Typical, men! I think he maybe did lose some kind of limb in the final season, but I digress. He walked so Dan Humphrey could run and that means he was way too powerful.
C Plot
If there’s an actual special place in hell, it probably resembles being on set of Scream Queens circa 2015. Emma Roberts is giving Lea Michele a run for her money this week for biggest bully after actress Angelica Ross said in an Instagram Live that Roberts made a transphobic comment to her on the set of American Horror Story: 1984. She tweeted later that Roberts had called her to apologize, but it ain’t looking good for nepo baby Roberts (not that it ever really has.)
Just a few weeks after writing a supporting letter about how good a husband That' 70s Show actor Danny Masterson is for a trial that resulted in him getting 30 years to life in prison for the violent rape of two women, Bijou Phillips is filing for divorce. Bye!!!!!!!!!
As of the time we’re writing this (which is actually a few hours early for once, thank you very much), Hollywood is apparently very close to reaching a deal to end the strikes, but hasn’t done so yet. We’ll be keeping an eye on this as per usual, but check out Rick Ellis’ newsletter Too Much TV as he’s been doing some great reporting on the strikes.
Ok this is not news, we just have a bone to pick with this reel that says “Conrad girlies are Paxton girlies, Damon girlies, JJ girlies, Peeta girlies, Nate girlies and I stand by that.” As experts of having a crush on many of these characters, wrong. How did Nate get on here? What does Damon have to do with Peeta? Paxton and JJ ascended to these ranks when? Should we start a fight with this girl on Instagram?