“Tweens” are a marketing category. The word was first coined in the late 1980s to describe 8–12-year-olds, those “big kids” who are starting to chafe at being considered children but are not yet ready (physically or emotionally) for the challenges of adolescence. Like many such artificially created terms, there is some utility to it. Childhood moves fast, and tweens are getting ever-closer to its end. They’re often drawn to stories about teenagers, mentally preparing themselves for their future.
In the 1990s and 2000s, children’s media properties — especially the ones on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel — stepped up their focus on the tween market. Shows like Wizards of Waverly Place, Hannah Montana. and Zoey 101 modeled an idealized version of teenage life for young viewers to imagine themselves in (even Saved By the Bell, launched much earlier than the golden age of tween programming, aimed at the younger side of its target audience). The Suite Life of Zack & Cody let young viewers grow up with the series’ titular twins, as the characters transitioned to a new show, set on a “semester at sea” (The Suite Life on Deck). By the mid-2000s, there were dozens of these shows. A lot of the actors attached to a single network would show up in more than one of its shows, often in a crossover or setting up potential spinoffs. (Nickelodeon made a spinoff of a spinoff when they created the ill-fated Sam & Cat, taking one lead actress each from iCarly and its spinoff Victorious.) A lot of talented young actors came through these stables, with the usual mix of outcomes: future successes, personal struggles, or leaving the industry and never coming back. (Put a pin in that.)
These tween shows were fast-paced, broadly acted, and clearly made on a shoestring budget. A lot of them were created by multi-camera sitcom veterans, and a lot of the storylines echo plots that were already getting hoary a decade or so before…but were also tried and true.
They weren’t entirely throwbacks. By the mid-2000s, the shows were notably racially and culturally diverse (though they drew the line at queer characters; there was a non-zero amount of queer coding, but that’s another essay). iCarly and Wizards of Waverly Place, had female leads, and many more were explicitly focused on girls. There were obligatory side plots and main plots focusing on the young men on the show, but their interior lives were not the focal point. Even The Suite Life, built on the Sprouse twins, had whole episodes where the female characters were front and center (I’m especially fond of an On Deck episode where Brenda Song’s spoiled rich kid character tries to bond with her rural grandmother).
When Shake It Up debuted in November 2010, it was just one more vehicle for young female aspiration: a buddy comedy that tapped into the increased popularity of shows like America’s Best Dance Crew and So You Think You Can Dance, with a nod to older shows like Soul Train and American Bandstand. The wildly successful Hannah Montana was just wrapping up, and Disney had realized that tweens liked programming focused on the performing arts, so it must have been a relatively easy sale.
What makes Shake It Up stand out in retrospect wasn’t the high-energy choreographed dance numbers, of course, or even the focus on the lives of girls. It’s the leads.
Will Zendaya become the most successful former child star? It’s far too soon to tell, but Kurt Russell never had multiple collections with Tommy Hilfiger. At her age, Drew Barrymore was struggling and Ron Howard was just beginning his directing and producing career. Ethan Hawke might be the closest in terms of feeling like a generational talent who also helped define that generation. At any rate, Zendaya’s post-Disney career has been pretty spectacular: she’s been in gritty teen dramas, a surprise black-and-white indie film, Marvel superhero movies, and colossal science fiction blockbusters. She’s also owned many a red carpet. Not bad for someone still under thirty.
Her co-star, Bella Thorne, might be most notable for how hard she turned against the Disney machine, cultivating a decidedly less family-friendly image as the years have passed. Maybe you remember her from the PornHub movie she directed. Or that time she may or may not have gotten OnlyFans to change their payment structure. Bella Thorne has had a less mainstream but still headline-grabbing post-Disney career, is what I’m saying.
The pilot episode of Shake It Up features Zendaya and Thorne as Rocky and CeCe, performing on an L platform, trying to earn enough money for some decent cell phones (ah, these tween shows age so fast). They earn a dime, which is later stolen when they try to shame their audience into giving more. It’s an old joke, but both the girls are charming and pretty and very good dancers. The over-the-top nature of Disney shows means everyone is going big and broad — Maile Flanagan, who did her time playing a principal on Lab Rats, noted that when she thought she was going too broad, the directors usually told her to go broader. This means that we’re always aware of just how hard the young actors are working. And Zendaya and Bella Thorne work.
Thorne and Zendaya audition for — and land featured dancing roles on — Shake It Up Chicago, a show-within-the-show similar to American Bandstand, only with more choreographed group numbers, and now you have the setup for the rest of the sitcom that follows. There’s some Hairspray in the DNA of the show too, with its behind-the-scenes focus and wacky cast, including a rival pair of dancers, Gunther and Tinka, heavily-accented siblings from a made-up European country — a bit of a cross between Mypos in Perfect Strangers and St. Olaf from The Golden Girls. (Gunther, who was only a regular in two of the show’s three seasons, was the obligatory queer-coded teen boy. Every Disney Channel sitcom and quite a few of the Disney Channel original movies had one. Some had two.) Other regulars include Rocky’s brother Roshon Fegan, an aspiring rapper who’s also an excellent dancer; Fegan’s best friend, best described as a junior-grade flim-flam man; and CeCes younger brother, basically the same one every one of these shows has. If you’ve seen an American family sitcom from about 1972–1992, you should already know the type.
Zendaya and Thorne are actually pretty believable as longtime friends, playing off each other well. Thorne’s CeCe is the impulsive one, Zendaya’s Rocky the more grounded one, but both of them are fully capable of getting up to their noses in the kind of wacky schemes that fuel buddy comedies. Other characters get pulled in and out of the plots as needed, including both Rocky and CeCe’s families (Rocky’s father is a hard-nosed doctor who expects his children to focus on “more important” things than the arts; CeCe’s single mom has a few dating subplots, you get the idea). There was one feature-length movie (treated as the Season 2 finale), a crossover with Good Luck Charlie (readers might remember it as “the one with the lesbian moms that resulted in death threats to a goddamn kindergartener”), and an adaptation on Disney Channel India (focused on two 13-year-old boys rather than high school girls).
Most of the Shake It Up cast has gone on to the sort of quiet career a lot of child stars end up in: Fegan had a prominent appearance in a single Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode, and most of the others have done an assortment of similarly small roles, single TV episodes and the like. Tinka’s actress, the delightfully named Caroline Sunshine, left acting, working in the Trump Administration and most recently with Vivek Ramaswamy’s ill-fated Presidential campaign. (And you thought Bella Thorne was going to have the weirdest post-show career.)
Meanwhile, Zendaya just chalked up another box office hit. She’s an executive producer on Euphoria and has who knows how many more projects in the works? I don’t know what she’ll do next but I’m excited to see it.
We’re all well aware that it’s not easy to be a former child star. Mara Wilson has written very thoughtfully about how even the most thoughtful and protective parents can’t buffer their children completely, and many children weren’t that lucky. I usually find myself rooting for the young people who survive the Disney/Nickelodeon machines (except maybe Caroline Sunshine). It’s nice to see an unqualified success story like Zendaya’s, even as we should be aware that there’s a price, and many hidden pressures behind the scenes.
Fun fact: fellow Disney Channel veteran Selena Gomez, now of Only Murders in the Building, sang the Shake It Up theme song. Look at how tiny and young everyone is!