Op-Ed: Lizzie McGuire & the Adulting Millennials Aren’t Allowed

By Jessica Wise

When I saw my teen role model, Hilary Duff herself, confirm the reboot of our generation’s beloved Lizze McGuire, I was grabbing butterfly clips and hip hugger jeans with the best of them. I monitored Instagram closely, seeing the production evolve behind the scenes. I called my best friend and reminisced when I saw Gordo and Ethan Kraft were returning. I nearly cried happy tears when it was announced that the entire original McGuire family was filming. Seeing the show that was with me through puberty and reminded me that I wasn’t alone through bras, first kisses, and tripping in the hall every step of the way, was now going to be with me again for my trying twenties was a dream come true.

So I thought.

This weekend, Hilary Duff released a statement announcing that production of the Disney+ reboot has paused due to Disney’s insistence that the story of Lizzie McGuire, now a 30-year-old single woman in the city, remains under a PG rating (Source: Instagram, Hilary Duff). 

Yes, the same company that put Family Guy on FreeForm wants to limit the Lizzie reboot to PG.

While I am just as disappointed as everyone else, I applaud Duff for taking a stand, especially to the content giant that is Disney. This stifling of Lizzie McGuire’s narrative is not just about pop culture. When you think about it, this is about a generation that’s only been allowed to grow up at the convenience of the “grown ups” in power.

Hilary Duff is also a star of TV Land’s dramedy Younger, where she plays a millennial publisher who realistically navigates her career, relationships and sex life, and growing up altogether. Like her character Kelsey Peters, Duff is struggling now to convince “the gray hair in the room” that her narrative is valid and deserves more exploration than its given credit for.

This is true both on and off camera, in countless everyday work environments.

Interns (often unpaid) use their expertise in social media marketing and technology to increase engagement for boomer and GenX-owned companies, for little to no payment or incentive.

In my experience and observation, companies will often hire young talent only to take advantage of their naivety and enthusiasm, reaping the benefits of their labor while paying them below the local market average.

Some of these things, in my internships and odd jobs over the years, I choose to overlook as long as I am gaining experience and being treated with dignity. But the minute there is any kind of protest or question raised about unfairness or legitimate injustices in the workplace, the first response I or a coworker would get is, “Well this how most companies do it.” This dismissal immediately puts young workers back into student mode, and it completely usurps them of any agency they can have in the conversation. This convinces young workers that injustices are acceptable, worse yet normal, simply because somebody “over” them has leveraged their experience against the naivety of the young worker. They stop asking questions, stop speaking up, and fall in line with the corporate abuse.

The millennial is immediately reduced to the child again, even though their career is their adult responsibility.

Let’s be clear, Lizzie McGuire was never a “family” show. It had family humor, of course, but the narrative centered around the growing pains of a teenage girl. It was about her relationship with her family, and how it had to evolve as she was growing up. Lizzie’s suburban family offered a quirky backdrop that exposed the normalcy of teen angst. However, her best friends Miranda and Gordo, and even secondary characters like Ethan and Kate, contributed more to the overall relatable teen narrative, because that is where the growing pains lay — at school with other pubescent teens who were just as confused and hormonal as she was. And as we, the preteen and teen viewers, were! To reduce Lizzie’s story at the age of the 30 to a palatable, diluted narrative that freezes her at 14 is placing her back in the same childlike place our generation fights to get out of everyday. This obstinance on Disney’s part not only is holding back some great content from hitting Disney+, but it’s also costing a lot of people their jobs.

Hilary Duff (“Lizzie”) on set with Adam Lamberg (“Gordo”).

All images sourced via the public Instagram of Hilary Duff.

Audacity does not own or claim the rights to these photos.

The viewers of Lizzie McGuire have grown up, and so should Lizzie. We’re working, paying bills, having sex, adopting pets, and transitioning in our relationships with our parents. Whether older adults like it or not, that is our reality now. It’s time we see ourselves in Lizzie McGuire again, as the director intended. It’s time to let us grow up.