by Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

The 2005-2006 television season saw a lot of great shows starting up or returning but, like many other years before it, the networks seemed pretty satisfied with the teen shows they’d already cultivated. At least, the broadcast networks were because the new pre-teen and teen shows of the season were largely on kid-centered networks like Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. Which is not to say that shows like Supernatural on The WB didn’t have a large teen (mostly teen girl) audience, but it wasn’t a show aimed at that demographic.

However, the Canadian import Life with Derek and the US-made The Suite Life of Zack & Cody were made for that exact group of people. As was the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender on Nickelodeon—the show with some of the largest impact, in terms of quality, though those Sprouse boys could give it a run for its money in the teen media department.

But let’s talk about Life with Derek first, as it is likely the least watched of the shows but acts as a kind of reimagined version of the early 1970s family show The Brady Bunch. It’s also the only one of those shows that ran during the “traditional” TV season of that year, as it began airing in September. Life with Derek is about two families that end up blending together and the teenage children, Derek (Michael Seater) and Casey (Ashley Leggat) are at odds with each other. Deeply. It’s mostly just a normal, especially for the time, kind of family sitcom where Casey is the narrator and, therefore, the de facto main character.

In terms of its relationship to The Brady Bunch, there are a lot of similarities. There are the superficial ones, like the kind of family sitcom it is, but there are also the more direct ones—like the opening credits. They have a familiar vibe and even the theme song is telling the story before the show started, in an almost identical way—they’re very much in conversation with each other. You also have the thing that most people remember about Life with Derek: Casey and Derek have… chemistry. Which is not dissimilar to the chemistry that oldest sister and brother Marcia (Maureen McCormick) and Greg (Barry Williams) had. And those two were actually romantically involved behind the scenes!

In fact, the romantic chemistry between step-siblings Casey and Derek gets clocked so often by people, both at the time of the show airing and now, that Seater and Leggat have addressed the pairing on social media. At the beginning of 2020, Leggat tweeted, “I still go down with this ship,” including the ship name in the hashtags: Dasey. Which I love. Listen. I’m here and I’ve been here since 2005. These two characters really do have chemistry in that kind of growing to love someone kind of vibe that makes shows like this fun, even if it’s not a romantic bend.

At the time, the series was well regarded, running for four seasons (a total 70 episodes) with a film to serve as the finale in 2010. It aired on Disney Channel beside another Canadian teen family dramedy, Naturally, Sadie, which was later pulled, though Life with Derek was left to do its full run on the American network. It should also be noted that Leggat and Seater remain very close to this day, and I just find them so, so charming! They just did that revival film in 2023, Life with Luca, but I maintain that Life with Derek is one of the shows from my childhood that I’d die for a proper TV show reboot or re-watch podcast with the original stars. Somehow, I just feel like that one would actually work!

But before Life with Derek graced our screens, there were two pre-teen shows that retain a much stronger legacy: Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender and Disney Channel’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. The former is an animated show about an alternate universe where magic exists, and their world has gone to shit. The latter is about twins who live with their mom in a hotel and get up to shenanigans. So, very different shows! But both shows were wildly popular and really got into the minds of teenagers and young adults of my era.

Of these three shows, Avatar: The Last Airbender likely has the widest appeal, reach, and biggest positive reaction. Created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko and beginning its run in February of 2005, Avatar became a smash hit for Nickelodeon. The first episode, alone, was given nearly perfect scores at the time, and the original series ran for three seasons with a total of 61 episodes. A live action feature film adaptation, a spin-off–The Legend of Korra–and a live-action Netflix series were all in the cards for the future of the animated series—keeping it around well into the modern era.

And then there’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, which stars a bunch of iconic Disney Channel stars. You’ve got the Sprouse twins, Dylan and Cole (who we’ll likely talk more about next month because of Cole’s involvement in Riverdale), Ashley Tisdale (who’d go on to star in the High School Musical movies, and Brenda Song (who would later appear in The Social Network, Dollface, and Blue Eye Samurai). Suite Life was such an absolute powerhouse for Disney Channel that it was actively part of one of the big crossover events of my childhood: That's So Suite Life of Hannah Montana (which included That’s So Raven and Hannah Montana).

And because the show started in January of 2005 and Disney (and Nickelodeon) always used to run episode counts like a TV show from the 1950s, Suite Life had 87 episodes and a spin-off series (The Suite Life on Deck) that has a similar number of episodes, clocking in at 71 for that series. Disney is nothing if it’s not prolific. The legacy of Suite Life is largely the proliferation of the Sprouse twins (mostly Cole), but also things like the Danimals Cruise contest—which people are still asking about to this day.

All of which is to say that while the 2005-2006 TV season didn’t actually produce that many new teen, or even pre-teen, shows, a bunch of shows that clearly still have a lot of impact on people my age (mid-range Millennials). These shows are still taking up a lot of space in our brains, largely because of the age we consumed them at. Well, that and how present all of them still seem to be with reboots, spin-offs, and the stars just continuing to work in similar (and often just as deranged) media.

Next month (our final of this series) we’ll be talking about the shows that have come since the decade of teen shows I arbitrarily decided was worth looking at because Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show of all time. Ryan Murphy, Jeff Davis, Josh Schwartz, and Stephanie Savage are about to enter the chat right before the end of traditional broadcast television. Get ready!