Date of airing: April 27, 2001 (Disney Channel)
This was a very interesting social experiment episode, even if it was less experimental and more social, unlike the episode “Jack of All Trades,” which had the intriguing premise of two students swapping their presentations to find out how the teacher grades individual students. But seeing a junior high school class playing married couples for a week to learn what it’s like to be an adult is a pretty neat idea, and I am saying that as someone who wasn’t involved in these kinds of social experiment classes back during my high school years. See, we didn’t do these kinds of things in German school – at least not in the two schools that I went to. It makes me think about how interesting school life could have been with these kinds of social experiments, or how different it may have been to pull off said exercises, simply because there always seemed to be more girls in my schools than boys.
Ten episodes in and I’m starting to get really warm with the show in general. The weird camera tricks have mostly been cut down (or I have been getting used to them, so they become less noticeable), and while there are still those childish sound effects, they have been minimized as well – LIZZIE McGUIRE is less an annoying show and more a comedy about t(w)eenagers trying to reach the next stage in life, which is the premise the show can focus on a little more, now that the childish “enhancements” in audiovisual things are taking a backseat. One can only hope the producers realized that those camera and sound effects were going on everyone’s nerves and gradually cut them out of the show with each episode, which means the second half of the season can only be much better than the first three episodes, and all the show needs to do from then on is entertain me with a great narrative in every episode.
 |
| Matt is not excited that someone has broken into his bat cave. |
This one for example had a great narrative, as the social class study led to a realization that friendship doesn’t stop when you’re married to another person, and that divorce and an unhappy marriage can still be part of your life, even if it’s just a week-long practice. Besides that, Lizzie and Gordo showed that a communal marriage is great as well and that it might be something to think about, just in case you never get to meet your soulmate, but instead have lifelong best friends in your neighborhood. You might not like each other at all times, you might get jealous of other people, and sometimes you don’t get to understand each other, but there is at least some sort of harmony, and as long as you respect each other as friends, you will love each other for eternity, and a “boring” marriage like Lizzie and Gordo’s can be long-lasting and more interesting than a marriage with two cheating partners.
Now, if the episode would have gotten more into the financial aspect of keeping a marriage alive, then this might have been more than just an episode in which characters were married off for a school project. It could have been an episode with morale, and a chance to give the middle school and junior high school audience a glimpse into their futures, economics included. Even when those futures look boring with the outlook of becoming a mailman or a garbage man, you can still have a bright future, because as it turns out, the hotshot woman you got to marry is not that smart after all and married life with her is a farce. And by the way, there is no way Kate would have ever thrown Katie Couric off broadcast news. No one is managing to do that even 20 years later.
Meanwhile, Matt and Sam moved into a bro cave, and it could have been a solid father/son storyline for the show, but thanks to the focus on its titular heroine, the boys of the show come away with a lesser amount of screentime. Only this time around, Matt was lucky to have been given a good enough story for me to get interested in it. Sure, it seems ludicrous that Matt would find a cave to live in and his father isn’t doing anything about it except making the cave look better, but compared to the other stories Matt was involved in, this one almost was close to becoming a story about an 11-year-old being a simple and easy-going 11-year-old, buddying it up with his thirtysomething father (or is he in his 40s?) who just wanted to be cool for his son.
 |
| Kate gets another shower of humiliation. |
One more thing: I’m loving the outtakes before the end credits. I would have never believed that the three-split scene during Lizzie, Miranda, and Gordo’s phone calls wasn’t actually a split-screen and instead just a clever set design that included an optical illusion. That almost gives me ideas to shoot scenes like this myself, but that will never happen because a) I don’t have friends to shoot things with, and b) I don’t have the tech available to impromptu direct a movie. There should be more behind-the-scenes footage than outtakes before the end credits because those are more fun. That should be part of every TV show’s end credits sequence.
