About six months ago my 7-year-old daughter switched her allegiance from NickJr to Disney Channel. Since my 5-year-old son basically does what she tells him to do, mostly gone are the days of Team UmiZoomi, Dora the Explorer, & Blue's Clues. I'm not too terribly sad about that, but Yo Gabba Gabba and Wonder Pets always brought at least a bit of humor to me, being written by hippies likely stoned as they wrote and produced the show.
So now we are living in the age of live-action Disney hell. Each show produces about as many episodes each year as a regular network does of their show, but they have the advantage of re-airing the shows somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 times in a 30-day period. And they do. Sadly, my kids are not yet at the age where they get bored after a second viewing of anything...if anything, they want to watch these shows again and again, like they did with Toy Story or Finding Nemo a few years ago. In fact, when their shows are not on they will grab the tablet and go onto Netflix to watch their shows again. There are some episodes of Good Luck Charlie Elizabeth has literally watched 20 times.
How do we rate these shows, now they are tattooed onto my brain? Here's five of the shows they watch the most, from best to worst:
Good Luck Charlie: I actually went onto Netflix and gave this three stars out of five. It's not horrible and better than most of the sitcoms on the networks. The star of the show, high school hottie Bridget Mendler, has a future ahead of her. Her brothers are funny, the parents aren't too terribly cartoonish, and while the little sister/title character was sadly miscast it's a show I don't mind watching (at least the first time or two). It's the simple story of a family in Denver of three kids where a fourth (Charlie) and fifth (Toby) are born, and they have real situations that are always handled with humor and class. It's not afraid to tell the truth that failure sometimes happens. Hot Bridget films a video diary for her little sister Charlie since she won't be around when she grows up.
A.N.T. Farm: Tells the story of 'Advanced Natural Talent' kids at a high school. Features a young singer, her brainy friends, and a few adults who play the baffoon. Completely and wholly the product of a writer's desperate mind, it has nothing to do with reality. But...it's not wholly unwatchable. The African-american girl as the lead character also may do something in life; she brings an energy to it that transcends the storylines of stupidity that were never written by anybody anywhere close to a school for gifted kids. I'd give it about 3 on a scale of 10.
Dog With a Blog: Last season on GLC the younger brother Gabe had a kinda-girlfriend who would have made an interesting recurring character, a violent pipsqeek that he had to take to a cotillion. Whatever...but this is what Disney does. It tests kids out in other shows and if they look good, they give them their own shows. The best idea they had was to blend a family and give them a dog that could talk, but only the kids could hear it. And, the dog blogs. It sounds like a can't-miss concept, I know...but it's awful. The sweet (and now annoyingly overacting) girl has an older brother who looks like he oughta be in a straight-to-DVD Bill and Ted prequel. The parents overact worse than the kids. And it's simply a ludicrous show. It's only been a few episodes, but I hope that the dog snaps and bites their heads off and it turns into an HBO prison show where he tells about his dark spiral into murder. I'll also give this a 3, but out of 100.
Jessie: Now we start getting into shows that make me want to punch walls. Here's a family living in a beautiful multi-million dollar condo in New York City. Four kids, at least two adopted, of course ethnically diverse (black and Indian). They have a butler who is a buffoon. And they hire a wanna-be singer from Texas, Jessie, to be their nanny, because the parents must certainly hate these children as much as I do and can't ever stand to be near them. But the new nanny is shrill, condescending, and dates the doorman of the building. Tonight's episode she was thinking of how she would tell him how she could not move in with him. This is a Disney channel show for small kids? I despise this show in so many ways. But it's not half as bad as...
Austin & Ally: Now we get to the reason that much of the world hates America...sometime in the past we exported to them this show and they can never forgive us. I don't blame them...it's awful. It features a Justin Bieber wanna-be (Austin) who sings in Miami. He has a songwriter friend (Ally), a fat kinda-Cuban manager who is incompetent (I don't care who her name is) and a doofus friend who is a mini-entourage (ditto). I have no idea what they do because I'm out of the room, looking for Advil when they come on. But I think they work at a music store? At a mall? Who cares? I've never been in a real fight in my life, but if I ever meet the person who greenlighted this show, I will sucker punch him/her. You think I'm kidding.
I must mention that over the holidays they had a special one hour Austin/Jessie/Ally special where Austin has to go to NYC to sing at Times Square on new years' eve and they meet Jessie and her brood. It involved planes, helicopters, and taxis and I kept hoping, nay, praying for a violent crash of one of them. Unfortunately, this never happened, and they lived to make more shows. Alas.
