Hannah Montana

The other day, I had the opportunity to watch the incredibly popular television show, Hannah Montana. I hadn’t seen this show before, and the episode that I watched may be my last.

I know you will be shocked, just as you were shocked when I said I didn’t like Ben Stiller, but I didn’t like Hannah Montana. I thought it was poorly written, poorly acted and the singing by Miley Cyrus (who plays Hannah Montana) was only average.

Poorly written? Yes. I felt the dialog was extremely contrived and not the slightest bit funny. It’s hard to be entertained by teenagers who behave unlike other teenagers I know. The attempts at slapstick comedy were lame. Example: someone carrying a caramel apple trips and the apple flies and somersaults through the air, landing on, and sticking in, another characters hair. Are you cracking up yet? No, oh wait, that’s because there’s a second caramel apple from someone else tripping flying through the air and landing on the same character’s hair. Now it’s funny, right? The characters and plot were not believable, and they were not believable in a non-funny way. You see, there are some characters and some contrived plots out there in TV Land which are not believable, but hysterically funny. Think Mr. Kimball on Green Acres, or Steve Urkel on Family Matters. But a lot of the attempts at humor were nothing but contrived one-liners that made my head hurt.

Poorly acted? Yes. Ms. Cyrus seems to excel at delivering snappy one-liners, but her poor body language, lack of facial expression and wooden emotion just left me cold. Her counterparts were not any better.

I am a big fan of the Disney show Lizzie McGuire. The difference? The writers had the characters on Lizzie McGuire act like teenagers. They were happy, they were sad, they got mad at each other, they made each other laugh, and they were completely believable in those roles without snappy one-liners. They behaved as teenagers behave. And the actors, even though they were teenagers, could act. Hannah Montana is a far cry from Lizzie McGuire.