Peak TV for Kids: Pastiche, Metadiscourse, and the Disney Channel Original Musical

The discourse around peak TV, the twenty-first-century development of sophisticated narrative television, has primarily focused around programmes made for the coveted 18–49-year-old key demographic. But since the mid-2000s, programmers have also applied the new modes of form and content developed in adult television to youth-targeted work. With the premiere of High School Musical in 2006, the humble Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) entered a new central position in the mediasphere, in no small part because of the care taken over the music and its role in the film’s storytelling. Just as the adult TV shows have responded to developments from film music while also innovating musically on their own terms, the cycle of Disney television musicals in the first two decades of the twenty-first century responded creatively to the classic musical genre, while also innovating within that genre. On the surface, the DCOMs exhibit the old-fashioned utopianism of the genre as described by Richard Dyer and the creation of the couple as theorized by Rick Altman: threats exist only to be allayed through song, and the couple that sings together stays together. Yet the DCOMs are not merely unqualified rehashes of earlier films. The High School Musical series updates and knowingly questions the tropes set up by Grease; the Teen Beach series interrogates the 1960s “Beach Party” musical cycle; and the Descendants franchise problematizes the pat good-vs-evil resolutions of Disney’s animated musicals. The pastiche and metadiscourse displayed by these TV films places them within the peak TV canon. These narrative modes culminate in the recent Disney+ series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which deploys the mockumentary genre to pastiche the pastiche in a fascinating example of recombinant meta-televisuality. By comprehensively pastiching the musical genre, these highly successful programmes introduce young television viewers to the innovations of peak TV.