Many in America have unfairly criticized this new Disney Channel TV-series as being yet another "Lizzie McGuire," simply because the show is for and about a girl in her early teens. For the record, I'd like to point out that this is a Canadian TV-show, and that shows like "American Dragon; Jake Long," and "The Suite Life of Zack & Cody" don't have preteen girls as main characters at all, even if Brenda Song & Ashley Tisdale outshine the Sprouse Twins.
Charlotte Arnold, who looks more like Emma Taylor-Isherwood of "Strange Days at Blake Holsey High," plays Sadie Hawthore, an aspiring animal, insect, and reptile biologist in her freshman year at R.B. Bennett High School, who thinks the laws that apply to nature apply to the ways of mankind as well. Her best friends, Margaret Browning-Lesveque(Jasmine Richards) and Rain Papadakis(Michael D'Ascenzo) are a fashion queen and an unlucky guy respectively. Her older brother Hal(Justin Bradley), is a standard goof-ball, jerky-idiot sibling with a fledgling rock band. She also has a crush on a boy on the school football team named Owen Anthony(Kyle Kassadjian, who shortened his name), but unlike Lizzie McGuire's Ethan Kraft, and Daria's Kevin Thompson, he actually has a brain under that helmet(Also, Daria didn't have a crush on Kevin).
No, Charlotte Arnold is no Hilary Duff, and while that's not a condemnation of Duff, it's still fine with me. It's also what makes her such a likable character. The show itself was written by those who wrote the Canadian kid's show "Our Hero," but you can easily figure that out by the narration between the scenes. Perhaps fewer Americans have seen those shows and that's why they make a false comparison to Lizzie. And while other children's programming that's shown on both cable television and network affiliates get the "Educational/Informative" label in order to fend off the wrath of anti-media zealots, this one deserves such a label.
When I originally wrote this comment, the show was focused on Sadie's love of nature. In the second season, that primary feature, which is what made both the main character and the show so unique, is slowly being whittled away. Not that this is enough to make me turn away from the show, but I can only hope the natural aspect of it isn't completely forgotten.
