46. Wizards of Waverly Place

Wizards of Waverly Place created by Todd J. Greenwald (Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment) 2007

Genre

Television program/Streaming Video (Note: while I watched an episode on Netflix; my library did have some copies on DVD, but the season 1 disc was out and I wanted to start from the beginning).

Review

The Wizards of Waverly Place is a family sitcom about three siblings in New York City who are being trained by their father to be wizards.  It seems that they have to keep magic a secret from everyone around them.  After the first two episodes, the individual characters didn't seem to have particularly distinct personalities; all of the characters felt flat, and the actor playing the children's father -- David Deloise -- seemed to be trying his best to impersonate his own father: actor Dom Deloise.  I watched two episodes: one in which Alex (the daughter played by Selena Gomez) uses magic to duplicate herself, so she can go to a sale at a clothing store and be in wizarding class at the same time; one in which Alex continually uses a time travel spell to help her brother have the perfect first kiss.  Magic seems inevitably to come with negative/humorous consequences on the show (which makes sense on a purely formulaic level as its the uniqueness of the given situation that most situation comedies mine for humor).

Opinion

The show feels very much like a Harry Potter rip off with its wizarding school elements; its combination of a fantasy world and the real world; and the fact that the family's sandwich shop is called the Sub Station and looks like a former train station.  But the show itself is very standard sitcom fare -- at least in its first two episodes.  The situations are tired and cliche: a sale in a department store where Alex has to race against her nemesis to get the jacket she wants; Justin's nervousness over his first kiss.  I felt that the first two episodes put a lot of focus on fairly superficial topics: the importance of getting the right jacket or how performing poorly at your first kiss could ruin your life.  Surely, teens and tweens already feel these anxieties, but the show merely seems to reinforce their anxieties without suggesting alternative view points or questioning where these pressures come from.  At the same time, I appreciated that the show wasn't overly pedantic or preachy.  Still, the show suffers from mediocre premises and terrible acting.  It serves as much as a vehicle for promoting the career of Selena Gomez (who stars and sings the theme song) as anything else.

Ideas

The library could certainly screen the show for tweens; it might be fun around Halloween or as a tie in with other magical or fantasy books, films, or party themes.