Date of airing: September 28, 2001 (Disney Channel)
written by: Douglas Tuber, Tim Maile
directed by: Savage Steve Holland
This was a surprisingly great episode. Lizzie went through a potential career without messing it up all by herself, and instead, she was dealing with an entirely different problem that rose out of her newfound hobby (for which she was hopefully compensated with more than just a gift card, or else, this modeling thing can be considered slavery), which cannot be blamed on herself or her behavior.
I absolutely loved the sequence of Lizzie playing the overconfident superstar with the posse that she can boss around, since her friends could not afford to bitch and moan (or they would lose access to the hottest parties in town), and I loved the premise of Lizzie tasting the superstardom without ever losing herself in it. In fact, she hated it so much that she decided to get out of it herself without the input of her friends or family. I wonder how many potential Disney or Nickelodeon stars discovered this episode and decided that getting out of that bubble before it burst was the greatest of all ideas.
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| Someone give this kid something to eat, so he can grow. |
I loved that the changed behavior in her friends was her moral of
the hour to both Miranda and Gordo, and I loved that her lesson worked
and that she found an opportunity to teach them to her friends for once,
instead of having to learn them herself (the last time that happened,
Lizzie was making friends amongst the wrong crowd). She felt bad for losing
her friends who transformed into mindless followers, and she decided to
be her worst, just to wake them up and realize the wrong turn they took
somewhere down the road. That scene might have been the best of the
entire series so far, although that does not say much, since LIZZIE
McGUIRE is not a particularly great show. It has to be said though that it
got a whole lot better after the first batch of episodes.
So, Lizzie turned into Hilary Duff for half an episode and became a superstar. I am kind of surprised the writers did not take this opportunity to go down a different route, or have Lizzie go through the real motions of being a superstar – not because she lost her friends, but because everyone was expecting more of her as a superstar model. Besides that, giving her a modeling career during her middle school days (or is she in junior high? Who knows these days...) could have been a great way to give the watching viewers a lesson on how to prepare for adulthood by planning ahead, or showing that the life of a child star is as hard as mining obsidian with a wooden pickaxe.
Plus, being a child star is awful, and this episode should have mentioned that, even if just in-between the lines (for the worried parents of the target audience who may have decided to become superstars themselves, thanks to Hilary Duff on the TV). But Lizzie became a star, had a few followers, people started acting differently around her, and all she could think of was how different her two best friends were all of a sudden and how the world has become worse because of it. I would have loved for that premise to be fleshed out a little more in this episode, and without the necessary antiques from Matt, the writers could have found an opportunity to make Lizzie’s story count a lot more.
There was another element I liked about Lizzie’s transformation from normal girl to most popular at school. When Ethan came around first during the opening half hours of the series, it was Lizzie who could not think of anything to say when standing in front of him, and it was her who rather wanted to walk away and bury her head in shame, because she could not stand being around this famous kid she had a crush on. In this episode, the roles were reversed – Lizzie became the popular kid, and Ethan became the nerd who could not get his mouth open and find words to speak, probably because he had a crush on her and did not want to ruin his chances (so, Ethan likes Lizzie?). For some reason, Lizzie did not see that morale during her travels in this episode, but I found it to be great writing for a hot minute or two. I wished the show could have had more of these moments.
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| Lizzie likes and hates the taste of superstardom and popularity. |
Or at least better stories for Matt. His adventures are always forgettable, except when he actually hangs with Lizzie’s crowd and interacts with her people. Trying to find something to spend money on and then having to return it was not the kind of story that got me laughing, chuckling, or even smiling, even if I once had that problem myself: I had some allowance and did not know what to do with it for a day, so I just browsed stores to check what I really, really wanted (and what I wanted was too expensive to buy). But Matt’s story was just so damn boring again. I was especially disappointed when it became clear that the writers attempted to bring Sam into the story, but in a way he did not have anything to do within Matt’s adventure, becoming only a face in it and removing the moral of the story. At some point, we are going to have to talk about the characters on Disney Channel shows who are the brothers of the central female character, and how awful those characters are.
