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We’re living in an age of television revivals. Plenty of cancelled and concluded TV shows have risen from the ashes for a second life on broadcast television, cable, or streaming. In the past few years alone, we’ve seen revivals of Dexter, Frasier, Phineas and Ferb, iCarly, Saved by the Bell, and many more. However, there is a television show that almost made it onto that list, but creative differences and a global pandemic stopped it from happening.

Lizzie McGuire was a tween sitcom that aired on the Disney Channel from 2001-2004. The series starred Hilary Duff as a middle schooler named Lizzie who navigated life as a young girl in the early 21^st century. The series was a ratings hit and inspired Disney Channel to launch more kid sitcoms.

And thus, when Disney was preparing to launch their streaming service Disney+, producing an adult Lizzie McGuire series seemed like a no-brainer. The original idea was that Lizzie had grown up with her audience, who could now follow her adult adventures. However, the series experienced creative difficulties, with various reports that Disney+ was skittish about the adult content. Duff, who wanted to be true to Lizzie’s journey, wasn’t up for doing a sanitized version of the reboot. This led to Duff announcing the project’s cancellation in a 2020 Instagram post. Jake Thomas, who played Lizzie’s younger brother Matt in the original series, recently detailed the downfall of the reboot.

“We tried. We tried a reboot,” Thomas says during an appearance on the Zach Sang Show. “I have a theory, to a certain degree, that the show is cursed, because this is not the first time that we’ve tried to do a continuation of the show. Originally, we were going to do after the original run on Disney Channel, they were going to put us on primetime ABC.”

“Lizzie McGuire, now she’s in high school. It was going to be a primetime dramatic series, and it just never came together. I guess the consolation prize was the movie. Which, still a pretty good prize!”

Speaking about the reboot, Thomas blamed Disney for having an identity crisis regarding the content on their streaming service.

“I think it was a combination of a lot of things. At the time, Disney+ had not launched yet. They were still figuring out what they wanted Disney+ to be, and I think at the time they were like, ‘This is going to be family friendly.’ Hulu is going to be their thing, this is going to be the family-friendly one, this is going to be Disney through and through.”

However, the Lizzie McGuire reboot was not being written as a family-friendly show.

“There was talk about doing some kind of adult themes within the reboot series. Creativity differences kind of came to a head, and you got two sides that didn’t agree on what the vision should be. And ultimately everybody kind of just was like, ‘Alright, well if we’re not going to agree, then we’re not going to do anything.’”

Meanwhile, the cast and crew had already started filming.

“We shot two episodes. They’re great episodes,” Thomas says.

Thomas says that the two episodes shot were a blend between the adult Lizzie the writers had in mind and the family-friendly Lizzie the studio wanted.

“Those first two episodes were very much, I thin,k in a neutral tone or voice, I would say. We shot those two episodes in late 2019, and the rest of the season had not been written yet. They shot those two episodes, we were going to go on a winter break, and they were going to write everything else for the rest of the season after they do a bunch of testing with those first two episodes. They really wanted it to be a success and hit everything on the right marks and everything.”

Thomas recalls how the producers were able to replicate the old McGuire house, which felt like a blast from the past.

“It was such a surreal experience, because they rebuilt the entire McGuire house on a stage. They made it a little bit larger and made them a little more affluent I feel like, but walking into that was like a dream.”

However, the tone still wasn’t where Disney wanted it to be.

“The testing came out, and they were like, ‘Alright, well this is what we want to see.’ The writing team was pretty much in the opposite direction, like, ‘Well no, this is kind of what we had intended. This is what we have.’ And nobody agreed on which path to go, so they parted ways with the showrunner, who was the original creator of the show, Terri Minsky.”

“They were like, ‘All right, we’re going to just figure it out, take a pause, and we’re going to bring on a new showrunner and figure out what this show is going to be.’ Hilary has to go do her last season of Younger, so we’ll probably have to pick that up afterwards because she’s obligated to do that.”

It was at that point that the COVID-19 pandemic began, shutting down all Hollywood productions. Thomas was in an unusual position. He couldn’t work because the series was on hold, and he couldn’t look for new work because he was on contract.   

“I’m on hold this entire time. I can’t do anything else. I’m under contract. They would not allow me to take any other work. Not like there was much being filmed during that time during COVID, but I couldn’t do anything.”

Thomas says he waited a year and a half, with Disney still promising that the show would resume production.

“This is I think the worst part of the story. It’s like 2020 and my contract hold is starting to get kind of close. My team is reaching out to Disney, and they’re like, ‘Oh, don’t worry. We’ve just onboarded a new showrunner. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the works right now. We’re going to be in touch really soon.’ Fantastic.”

“I think probably within a couple of weeks my friend Aaron who lives in Louisiana texts me. He’s like, ‘Hey man, I’m sorry.’ I was like, ‘What.’ He was like, ‘Hilary posted on Instagram.’ So, I go onto Instagram and Hilary has a whole text photo posts that’s like the show’s not happening….yadaa yadda…couldn’t agree..I wanted to be true to the voice. This is how I found out I wasn’t going to have a job, which kind of sucked. And then later I get a call, but yeah, it sucked to find out that I didn’t have a job from Instagram.”

Still, as Thomas points out, the last time a Lizzie McGuire sequel series was cancelled, a movie was made as a consolation prize. As Hollywood struggles to find its next big hit, an adult Lizzie McGuire movie could do serious numbers.

If not, they should at least release the two episodes they’ve already filmed.

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