Perhaps the only people who know (or, frankly, care) that Hannah Montana is having its 20th anniversary this Tuesday—an occasion Disney is marking with a live-interview-concert special with Miley Cyrus, the show’s star, hosted by Call Her Daddy podcaster Alex Cooper—are “zillennial” women. This micro-generation, of which I’m a card-carrying member, was born between the early 1990s and early 2000s. We arrived in a world re-shaped by tragedy and the Internet boom, came of age during a financial crisis, and chose as our standard-bearer—ask your twentysomething niece or daughter but, good God man, hopefully not your girlfriend, lest you be pulling a Leo DiCaprio!—a 13-year-old pop star in a platinum-blond wig.
It all started as the brainchild of show-runner Michael Poryes, who had previously co-created That’s So Raven, a sitcom starring Raven-Symoné about a teenage psychic that ran on Disney Channel from 2003 to 2007. Now Disney wanted Poryes to make a new show—this one about a pop star. With a pilot secured, he came up with the dual-identity idea that would become Hannah Montana’s trademark: a small-town girl living in Malibu who, at night, puts on a blond wig and transforms into a pop star. It was Clark Kent and Superman for tween zillennials. “My feeling was that I want to write about a real person, and the fact that she’s a pop star is a complication to real things,” he tells me.
