UPDATE: Confirmed by Deadline after one of our readers reached out on our behalf. Thank you, Grant! Also confirmed today, Just Roll With It is now “officially” cancelled. As we told you back in June. Fam Jam has also been cancelled.
Well, it’s time to induct yet another Disney Channel show into the “2 seasons club”
What’s so weird is the club membership has been growing rapidly since the beginning of the pandemic. In the past 14 months we’ve seen the ending of Coop and Cami Ask The World, Just Roll With It, and now, Gabby Duran & the Unsittables. Prior to the pandemic 7 Live-Action series had the distinction of ending after 2 seasons:
- Lizzie McGuire
- Phil of the Future
- Cory in the House
- JONAS
- Sonny With a Chance
- I Didn’t Do It
- Best Friends Whenever
Now we’ve added 3 more.
Gabby Duran Is Cancelled?
Series star Nathan Lovejoy posted a goodbye to the series on his Instagram today.
The rest of the cast, including star Kylie Cantrall, joined him in mourning the series in the comments.
Valery Ortiz, Gabby’s TV-mom got choked up.
In a bit of levity, Rebecca Metz from the similarly pandemic-cancelled Coop & Cami joked with him they should have a “two-season parent dinner.”
What Was It About?
Gabby Duran starred Kyle Cantrall as the new girl in town who also happens to be a sneakerhead, prankster, and, oh yeah, lowkey babysitter of aliens. Before long her best friend Wes (Maxwell Acee Donovan) and her sister Olivia (Coco Christo) were in on it. They worked with the hilarious undercover alien, Principal Swift (Nathan Lovejoy) and his oddball nephew, Jeremy (Callan Farris). The series was based on a book series by Elise Allen.
Why Did The Ratings Fall?
It had all the tools to be a successful show on a kids network, but Disney and the pandemic didn’t do it many favors. For starters, Gabby only had a handful of episodes filmed when the pandemic halted production everywhere. While Disney continued to air episodes throughout the pandemic of their other series, Gabby went dark from March 20th, 2020 to June 4, 2021, a Disney Channel record of 441 days in between seasons.
Disney made a super weird choice to wait until the entire season had finished production and then still continued to sit on the episodes until premiering season 2 this past summer. Other series had aired full seasons between January and June when Gabby premiered. Disney could have brought Gabby back in January for a few episodes alongside Secrets of Sulphur Springs. When a series disappears, kids move on.
How Could It Have Improved?
Besides scheduling? It felt like the show would have benefited from Gabby having Wesley’s girlfriend, the alien psychic, Sky (Elle McKinnon), as a series regular and a female voice for her to bounce ideas off. We also would have had her frenemy / bully Susie (Bracken Hanke) as an ongoing nuisance, trying to uncover Gabby’s secret. Think the “FAIRY GODPARENTS!” guy in Fairly Odd Parents. It’s unclear why, but it seems a lot of these Disney Channel / Nickelodeon series have forgotten how much it adds to their stories when the main characters face an ongoing “bully” for them to outsmart, outwit, and take the pratfalls.
On December 8th, 2021 Disney+ USA will add the remaining 11 episodes from season 2 at which point the complete series will be available to stream.
Trailer
Farewell, Gabby.
Thanks to Disney Channel megafan Grant for the heads up.
Drew Ryan is a film, TV, and Disney geek. He has degrees in English, Student Personnel Administration, and Library & Information Science from Lawrence University, Concordia University-Wisconsin, and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Interested in the minutia and licensing of streaming service content, he is always publishing lists, suggestions, and advocating for Disney’s missing library to be added to Disney+. Drew subscribes to Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, and Paramount+. You can find him waxing nostalgic over classic Disney Channel or geeking out over Marvel, CW shows, & Disney on Twitter.
