by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

As 1999 was winding down and the latest crop of TV shows were set to make their premiere in the new millennium, it was clear that we were entering something specific. Lots of reality shows made their debut, including Fear Factor, MTV Cribs, and Temptation Island (which recently got a reboot/continuation). It also saw the addition of shows like CSI, Girlfriends, and Dark Angel airing alongside some of my favorites, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel: the Series, Futurama, and That ‘70s Show. It’s also the TV season that didn’t see the return of some teen show titans. Boy Meets World, Beverly Hills, 90210, and Party of Five all said farewell to the American small screen, leaving a void. 

The executives at every major network were aiming to fill that void, including Disney Channel. While the channel had been largely filled with animated shows, there had always been a few live-action ones sprinkled here and there—until the 2000-2001 TV season, that is. This time saw the beginning of what would eventually be a boom in teen shows on the network (truly more of a pre-teen vibe, if we’re being honest, but they’re important nonetheless). Even Stevens and the mid-season airing of Lizzie McGuire went down in history, as far as I’m concerned—and I imagine if you asked any millennial woman within my specific age range, they would say the same thing. 

The chokehold that Lizzie McGuire, and specifically Hilary Duff, had on me (and all of my friends) is so strong that I’m literally collecting the tie-in novels as an adult and recently bought her first album Metamorphosis on vinyl because Disney did a big release of classic 2000s ephemera, clearly aimed at me. As a show, it was this perfect piece of pre-teen girl media. Silly and goofy, but also kind of serious in its understanding and specific preoccupations of the teen girl mind. Like most shows set in the “now,” it’s supremely dated in its costuming, language, and teen accessories (the inflatable furniture sold at Limited Too is so specific), but it speaks a universal truth: being a teenager is hell, but sometimes it's also fun. 

In Lizzie’s world, being a teenager is about wanting to get a training bra because everybody else is, but it’s also about sneaking onto the set of a hot pop star’s music video. It’s being called an “outfit repeater” by the meanest girl in school, but it’s also about your annoying little brother helping you devise a plan to get her back. It’s about fighting with your friends, nearly ending your relationships, but it’s also about falling in love with one of them on a trip to Rome, right before high school. (A trip to Rome that is also about pretending to be a popstar—the plot of The Lizzie McGuire Movie is insane in the best way possible.) 

The series also absolutely launched its star, Hilary Duff, into the teen stratosphere right at the start of the new millennium. The series ended up making Disney over $100 million from merchandising alone and allowed her to be cast in other Disney Channel properties, like the DCOM (Disney Channel Original Movie) Cadet Kelly. It was a film that launched a thousand baby sapphics as the women who led Disney’s live-action 2000-2001 debut shows (the other being Christy Carlson Romano, who starred in Even Stevens) destroyed the watch records on the network. She also started a very well received pop career, eventually singing in Lizzie McGuire and putting out five studio albums. 

All of which is to say that Lizzie McGuire was big. Its cultural impact was far reaching, but perhaps not quite as far reaching as one of the other biggest teen debuts of that season: Gilmore Girls. Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino for The WB, the series is about a mother and daughter who are best friends, living in a small, kitschy town in Connecticut. She’d pitched a few ideas to the executives at the thriving teen network, including Susanne Daniels. Daniels was the president of entertainment for the WB, at the time, and she remembers being enthralled by Amy Sherman-Palladino’s sensibility. She was “edgy, yet sentimental” and it really came through when she threw out the not particularly developed idea of a young mother (who had been a pregnant teen) and her now teen daughter. 

In “Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise & Fall of the WB and UPN,” which Daniels co-wrote with the editor-in-chief of Variety Cynthia Littleton in 2007, she talks about Amy Sherman-Palladino’s further development of the original pitch. She wanted to write a different kind of teenage girl—one that was “fiercely independent and intellectually precious but naive in matters of the heart.” Originally pitched as a half-hour, because Amy Sherman-Palladino’s background was in traditional comedy shows with a 22-minute runtime excluding commercials, Daniels suggested Gilmore Girls be an hour-long show. It was obviously not the first dramedy, even in teen television, but it ended up being a formula for success. 

Now, I don’t actually like that Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) could be described as “fiercely independent,” but everything else that Amy Sherman-Palladino aimed to do with that original idea, I think she nailed. And while Gilmore Girls is certainly a show with two leads, I actually don’t think Rory is the lead—at least not by the end of that first season. No, by the time the first season ended on May 10th, 2001, it was really clear that Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) was the main character. 

Which is ultimately what made Gilmore Girls such a successful show. It’s about a mother and daughter in pretty equal measures, delving into both of their love lives and family relationships. Lorelai, having gotten pregnant at 16, lives in a kind of arrested development, which makes her relationship with Rory much more of a best friendship than a mother-daughter situation… until it needs to be. Rory’s character arcs, especially as a teenager, are often very typical teenage girl stuff. They tend to involve growing up a little (even if it takes a while) to figure out. Lorelai’s character arcs are also usually about growing up, but they’re often more adult problems that she’s still having a teenage reaction to. I mean, it’s a little bit hard to throw a tantrum at your parents when you’re asking them for tuition money for your daughter. Yet Lorelai practically has a gold medal in this particular event. And when she has to put her foot down and be the adult in the room, Rory often punishes her for it—the same way Lorelai punished her parents.

Gilmore Girls ends up being a show about cyclical trauma and the kinds of relationships you have, care for, and ruin, with the women in your family—but it’s also really cute and fun and even a bit sexy sometimes. So, because it’s about a mother-daughter relationship (two, actually, once Emily Gilmore becomes more of a main character) the series took off with teen girls and their mothers. Surprising no one, at least in hindsight. Daniels ends the section of “Season Finale” on Gilmore Girls with the note “good mother-daughter stories never go out of style.” Which, given the 153 episode run over seven seasons (plus a revival in 2016 on Netflix), she was correct about. Gilmore Girls is a show that only grew with word-of-mouth. Even the final season, which saw the exit of Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, had higher ratings than that first season—which still held its own in a time slot against Friends. 

Like, I love Lizzie McGuire, obviously, but I didn’t go on a trip with my best friend to see where Terri Minsky took inspiration from for the show. Which is something I did in February of this year when I went to Connecticut to see the towns that inspired Stars Hollow. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before it, Gilmore Girls remains both impactful because of its structure, its quick and quotable dialogue, and its utter rewatchability. Not to mention the careers it lent itself to, not just of the people who worked on it, but the people who were inspired by it. The WB allowed the series to truly thrive and change teen television—which it absolutely did.