'Lizzie McGuire' Scrapped Revival Writer Reveals What The Heck Was In It
The series was part of Disney+’s big launch announcement, only to collapse over 2020 with few episodes filmed
It has now been 4 years since Lizzie McGuire creator Terri Minsky departed the then-developing Disney+-intended revival she was showrunning over creative differences. Series star Hilary Duff would rather quickly hint that those creative differences entailed as being thought not "family-friendly" enough by executives at the streamer. Now, thanks to writer on the series Jonathan Hurwitz, we have an idea of what might have been so raunchy to spook them.
But first, the basic premise. 30-year-old Lizzie lives in Brooklyn as an interior designer’s apprentice engaged to a SoHo restaurant owner (or chef?)…who cheats on her and when caught Lizzie retreats home to her childhood Los Angeles home where her parents still live, and apparently, her animated self too. Episode 2, Hurwitz described, would reveal Lizzie and Gordo have been texting “occasionally” over the years. Gordo, played once again by Adam Lamberg, it turns out is happily engaged and they’re having a baby. The episode would end with Lizzie getting a text from her old crush Ethan Craft, who appears to have been played once again by Clayton Snyder as nothing to the contrary was divulged. Lizzie’s family, parents Jo and Sam and brother Matt, was played once again by their original actors Hallie Todd, Robert Carradine and Jake Thomas. The unfilmed but scripted episode 3 opens in a manner described by Hurwitz as such: “Lizzie wakes up in Ethan’s bed, in his water polo t-shirt. Animated Lizzie pops up and she has this little checklist, like a to-do list, and Ethan is on the list and she checks it off.”
Hurwitz continued, “I think she says something like, ‘I checked that box –dramatic pause– twice.’ So if I had to guess, I saw another comment about certain storylines [about] why Disney wasn’t comfortable with it, my guess was… that moment was probably one of them.”
The show was truly being hyped, having posted photos of Hilary reuniting with her onscreen family and Lamberg, the latter also getting a video. There was one clip the public ever saw of the show, included in the streamer’s “What’s Coming In 2020” video. It’s still the thumbnail! Over the three years since the revival was officially canceled, the building of Disney+ has seen decisions that could be viewed as salt in the wounds of fans still hurt that it never came to be. First, Hulu series like Love, Victor (one of the series cited in Duff’s urging to move Lizzie to the more adult-oriented streamer) and The Orville make it to Disney+, and are followed by R-rated Marvel movies Logan and the Deadpools as well as Marvel’s much more violent Netflix series like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, setting up specific parental controls parameters for users should they need it. Duff went on to star on How I Met Your Mother spin-off How I Met Your Father, which ran on Hulu for two seasons before being canceled last year. Then came the combining of Hulu and Disney+ that’s now in beta, welcoming all sorts of family-unfriendly content to the platform. The collapse also seemingly led to Paramount+ ordering an iCarly revival with similar maturity, that they canceled last year after 3 seasons and 33 episodes.
The timing is somewhat funny, as a few weeks before Disney officially canceled the reboot of the classic in December 2020, Duff announced her pregnancy with her third child, Mae James Bair, who would be born in March 2021. Duff announced last month that she is pregnant with her fourth child.
Around a year ago, she was still optimistic it could happen, knowing where the streamer was is pretty different from where it is now, saying the revival was still what she wanted from the concept and “Disney+ was very new and I think they were figuring out their [stuff] and we were figuring out our [stuff].” Hurwitz’s TikTok revealing the reboot details is below.
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