Jayce Rodrigues

A monitor displaying the Disney sitcom “Hannah Montana”.

Disney sitcoms have been around since approximately 1993. Since then, Disney sitcoms have had a pretty stable place in the Disney corporation. 

Recently, people have started to complain about how these shows have slowly lost their appeal. For example, according to IMDb, a new Disney show released in 2019 titled Gabby Duran and the Unsittables has a resounding rating of only 5.9/10 rating, compared to a show such as Boy Meets World which currently sits at an 8.1/10 rating. 

While this might be a problem where Disney’s overall quality is starting to drop, it could also be the public becoming nostalgia blind. Nostalgia blindness is when people find an old piece of media they really liked as a child, which skews how they viewed these shows as they grew up. This can cause old shows like, for example, “Girl Meets World” to be looked back on fondly, only for it to be of low quality and have poor storytelling elements. Viewers recalled how in “Girl Meets World” there was a love triangle between the main characters that viewers were not too fond of.

What I wanted to find out is if, for sure, Disney shows have truly slowly gotten worse, or perhaps we are blinded by nostalgia and just yearn for how things used to be.

I will grade these sitcoms on two factors: storytelling and comedy. I will watch the first and last seasons of these shows. I will also rank how well they kept the quality of the first season compared to the last. Then, I will also compare them to each other.

I started off with a 2006, very popular Disney sitcom called Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana stars a young Miley Cyrus, who plays a character named Miley. However, she can’t let her peers know her secret identity as Hannah Montana because she just wants to live a normal life. Throughout the series, we go through her life as a pop star and how hard it was to keep her identity a secret. Overall, I found the first season to be very entertaining and fun. It has a special charm, and I had a lot of fun watching it. 

As for the final season, we see a lot of growth from the first season, as a grown version of Miley who’s now gotten into Stanford College is shown. Despite the amount of change, the first season’s charm continued throughout the show. Overall, I would give Hannah Montana a solid 9/10, a very enjoyable watch.

As an example of a newer Disney sitcom that I found one with a solid four stars on IMDb is titled Bizaardvark. This sitcom follows two girls, Paige and Frankie, who are starting their careers as Vuuuglers, which is the equivalent to Youtubers in the sitcoms world. In the first episode, they’re on a mission to get accepted into the Yuugle studio. Yuugle studio is where all these worlds Vuuuglers go when they reach 10,000 subscribers and allows them to network with other very large Vuuglers.

Overall, Season one is pretty good. It didn’t make me laugh as much due to humor that ended up fairly outdated, but overall I think it’s a pretty good, light plot that you could do a good amount with. By the third season, I think a lot of its charm started to get lost, which is a problem many younger sitcoms deal with. I give this show a 6/10 as an overall rating. The humor was very much based on the 2016 era, so it didn’t age well as time passed. The problem is that it is super humor-reliant for the situations at hand, so it is not enjoyable overall.

I noticed a trend of Disney sitcoms that base themselves on the internet not getting a good rep because they rely on comedy that ages quickly. When relying on internet-related things, a show is already late to the trend when it starts. Along with that, even for shows that are not based on the internet, the comedy still does not hold up very well, unlike shows such as Hannah Montana.

After analyzing these two shows I wasn’t able to collect more research on the difference between these older vs new sitcoms but these are two great examples of the contrast. After these two shows, I have noticed that over time the quality starts to decline more as you get into the newer shows. However, this could be due to the shows I chose and could be different for others. What are your thoughts on the topic? Do you think current sitcoms are good? Are there any special sitcoms that you would recommend?