If I were a television executive, particularly one at a large streaming platform that contains a teen network, I would certainly consider a reboot of Zoey 101. The tween series, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and starred Jamie Lynn Spears as a boarding school student in Malibu, is remembered fondly by a certain slice of Nickelodeon-raised late millennials. Its ending felt premature and tinged with sadness, as the series finale aired a few months after Spears, the younger sister of Britney, revealed that she was pregnant at 16. Though the show had already wrapped production before Jamie Lynn became a too-young tabloid fixture, the popular impression was that her off-screen shock pregnancy torpedoed the cutesy, very PG series. (As a 14-year-old at the time, this was a brain-searing event.)
In other words, there’s an on-paper case for Zoey 102, the new Paramount+ movie reboot of the series, in the sense that there was a lingering feeling of unfinished business to the show and that streaming service logic demands anything once popular be tried again. But it’s a fool’s errand. The revisionist happy ending for Zoey 101 feels at best strange and too overdue to work. (The logline bills the reboot as Zoey finding herself in her 20s, though the cast “graduated” high school 15 years ago and are almost entirely in their mid-30s; Spears herself is 32.) At worst, as often is the case with the finished product, it’s so focused on recapturing long past, hazily remembered magic as to be cringe-inducing.
