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Lizzie McGuire fans were bummed when its proposed Disney+ reboot got the boot, but now we’re finally getting details about why the show was really canned.
One of the writers on the defunct project, Jonathan Hurwitz, has taken to TikTok to share some details, per Deadline. Noting that they “wrote and shot the first two episodes” of the show before it was canceled, he began discussing episode 1, which took place in New York.
“Lizzie’s (Hilary Duff) been working and living there as an interior designer,” he explained. “And she’s dating this very handsome chef, and she ends up finding that he’s been cheating on her with her best friend.”
This would have led Lizzie to go back home to California — described by Hurwitz as “the home that we all saw in the original show” — “where little animated Lizzie has been waiting for her.”
In response to those wondering if Lizzie and Gordo (Adam Lamberg) would have been “endgame,” Hurwitz said that the two would have met up in the second episode … but Gordo would reveal that he’s happy and engaged to another woman, who is pregnant. However, this wouldn’t have excluded Lizzie from reconnecting with a different man from her past.
“And episode 2 ends with Lizzie getting a text from Ethan Craft (Clayton Travis Snyder),” he said. “And little animated Lizzie faints.”
Although episode 3 “wasn’t filmed,” Hurwitz noted that “there was a script for it.”
“Lizzie wakes up in Ethan’s bed, in his water polo t-shirt,” he teased. “And 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. I think she says something like, ‘Well, check that box — dramatic pause — twice.”
As for if “certain storylines” made for “why Disney wasn’t comfortable with it,” Hurwitz claimed that his “guess was that moment was probably one of them.”
Hurwitz, who admitted that he’s “still not over” the project’s cancellation in a previous TikTok, said the experience was “truly what dreams were made of.”
Duff, who was launched to stardom by the original 2000s Disney Channel series, broke the news that the reboot “wasn’t going to happen” in December 2020, just under a year after its creator, Terry Minsky, exited the series.
She iterated sentiments similar to Hurwitz in a May 2022 interview with Women’s Health, arguing that present-day Lizzie “had to be 30 years old doing 30-year-old things.”
“She didn’t need to be doing bong rips and having one-night stands all the time, but it had to be authentic,” she shared. “I think they got spooked.”
While we won’t be seeing grown up Lizzie any time soon, it’s plenty easy to watch the original Lizzie McGuire, which is now streaming on Disney+, which also is home to The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
