A Look at Even Stevens

I have recenlty discovered and become mildly addicted to the Disney Channel Original Series Even Stevens. While I had heard of the show some time ago, it was only after watching Shia LaBeouf win an Emmy for Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series that I decided to watch the show. LaBeouf, who plays lovable goof Louis Stevens on the show, was genuinely surprised about his award. He had beaten LeVar Burton, a two-time winner, Donna Pescow, the veteran actress who plas LaBeouf's mother on the same show, and Elmo! Who is this kid, I thought. And why did he win the Emmy over all of those better-known performers? I started watching the show to find out. Not long after that, Disney had an all-day Even Stevens marathon, which helped in getting up to speed.

As a Disney production, I expected Even Stevens to be about a basically good kid who gets into trouble all the time due to misunderstandings, mistaken identities, the machinations of others, and his own folly. A typical episode would have to include broad humor, plenty of mayhem, and a neat, sappy ending.

Even Stevens (ES) is all that and then some. I did not expect the show to explore issues such as tolerance and civil disobedience with a much lighter hand than is typical of other Disney fare, e.g., Boy Meets World.

Two of my favorite episodes illustrate how ES mixes slapstick humor with more subtle lessons. In "Hutch Boy," Louis has to deal with Lloyd Offler, the junior high bully. LaBeouf shines in the episode, as Louis must by turns be obnoxious, sincere, over-confident, and afraid.

The story opens with Louis playing a fairly cruel trick on Tom, his friend and the wimpiest boy in the school. Louis has rigged up a fake, but realistic looking flying squirrel. While his best friend Twitty ducks away, Louis taunts Tom with the squirrel. He takes immense and remorseless pleasure in scaring his friend. Louis actually takes pride in pulling off the mean-spirited trick. His victory is short-lived, however. As Louis, Twitty, and Tom are about to walk into the school, Lloyd Offler approaches. Lloyd is muscular and menacing. Out of the blue, he accuses Louis of staring at him. LaBeouf takes Louis from triumphant to bewildered as he struggles to explain that he just happened to be looking in Lloyd's direction. The bully doesn't buy the excuses. He warns Louis that he is watching him. After Lloyd walks off, Tom comments that he doesn't like people picking on others. He'd rather live in a world with less picking and more hugging. Twitty and Louis respond with "Yeah, right."

At lunch, Louis is once again all bravado as he makes fun of Lloyd and his threat. Lloyd appears out of nowhere (again) and warns Louis to wait for shop class. Tom insists that Louis stand up for himself. Louis poo-poos the advice.

Shop class comes. Twitty makes fun of Tom's project, a miniature chair, and suggests he must be making it for a dollhouse. Although Louis is shaking with fear, the clueless teacher leaves class and puts Lloyd in charge. (ES often shows adults being oblivious to what is really going on with the kids who are supposed to be under their supervision in the classrooms, the school hallways, and at home). Lloyd promptly steals the shelf Louis is working on and puts it inside his hutch. Tom again urges Louis to stand up for himself. Louis makes a cliche' laden apology, and Lloyd seems to accept. Instead, he locks Louis in the cabinet and invites everyone to look at "Hutch Boy." Everyone is stunned into silence and inaction...except Tom. He puts on an amazing karate display and releases Louis from the hutch. Louis is in awe of his friend. But later worries that he has replaced Tom as the biggest wimp in the school. Twitty and Tawny (Louis' friend and enamorata) dismiss Louis' fears. He is justified when he's greeted with taunts of "Hutch Boy" upon boarding the school bus.

Louis reluctantly goes to Tom for guidance and again lets his own overconfidence get the better of him. After Tom agrees to help, Louis foolishly calls Lloyd and threatens to kick his ass. This being the Disney Channel, he actually says something about opening a can of Lloyd stroganoff. There is one problem: Tom informs Louis that it will take nine years to learn karate.

A slapstick gag sequence ensues as Tom shows Louis the basics. Louis learns nothing other than how to bow and tighten his belt. (Sight gags, fast motion, and fantasies occur in just about every ES episode. Toilet humor and messy eating appear regularly, too. That sort of broad humor rarely advances the plot, but it does appeal to the intended audience of tweens--children ages 8 to 14).

Tom leaves Louis with sage advice: "Harness your inner strength." After dismissing his friend's words (again), Louis literally uses a harness to fake out Lloyd with some "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" moves. He is pretty convincing until Twitty and Beans (Louis' younger friend) start pulling Louis up at the wrong time, making Lloyd suspicious. Twitty and Beans run off, leaving their friend to plummet to the ground and face Lloyd alone.

Louis decides to take his medicine and offers up his cheek for Lloyd to hit. The bully is impressed with Louis' mechanical skills, and the two walk off with their arms around each other. Tom appears from the shadows. His ways have won out, afterall.

The "Hutch Boy" episode has a message about standing up for oneself, even if that may mean putting oneself in harm's way. More interestingly, the episode explores tolerance and stereotyping. Twitty, Tawny, and Beans are supposed to be Louis' closest friends. Yet they abandom him or fail to show support at crucial moments. Tom, the effeminate guy on the fringes of the group, proves to be a truer friend in both word and deed. Even the bully has some redeeming qualities. Perhaps his physical presence has kept the other kids from trying to get to know him.

In case viewers don't get the messages of tolerance and resisting stereotypes, "Hutch Boy" includes a subplot in which Louis' brainy and brunette sister Ren has her hair dyed blonde. (Her ditzy blonde friend Ruby did the deed). Ren's horrified at first, but changes her mind upon walking down the hall. Everyone sees her in a new light, especially the boys. Even Louis comes on to her before realizing that he's just made a pass at his older sis. Ren starts reading fashion magazines in class and beginning every sentence with "omigosh!" Her parents realize something is up when she blows off her Junior Overachievers meeting. Eventually Ruby sets her straight by pointing out that other blondes are good students, and that Ren did not have to alter her whole personality just because her hair color changed. . Ren realizes her mistake; all is forgiven.

In "Band on the Roof," Tom makes a Behind-the-Music style documentary of the TwittyStevens Connections, the group that resulted from Louis and Twitty's dueling bands in an earlier episode. The new band consists of Louis on drums, Twitty on guitar, Tawny on keyboards, Artie (a recurring character) on bass. Artie quits in short order and is replaced by Beans.

The band brings Louis and Ren together. They even write a song together, the catchy "Perfect Day." The band continues to rehearse in the Stevens' basement, and things seem to be going smoothly. Louis then suggests that they do a concert on the school roof. Ren is uneasy about the idea. She double checks with Principal Wexler and finds out that students are forbidden from going up on the roof.

Ren suggests that they try a concert in the park instead. Louis thinks she's chicken. She refuses to get in trouble and quits. Not a good sign.

Louis sticks to his guns as one by one, his bandmates bail on him. On the day of the concert, Louis plays drums and sings background vocals on the roof. Naturally, Twitty, Tawny, Beans, and finally Ren join him. They finish their song as students on the ground dance and the principal throws a fit. In the end, the kids take their punishment--picking up trash after school.

"Band on the Roof" is a great send-up of all the TV biography shows, especially VH1's Behind the Music. For instance, after Artie quits--and isn't there always an original band member who quits--he threatens to start a competing band. Clever interviews with band members and the Stevens family are also interspersed with the action.

Behind the humor is a message not just about taking risks, but about facing the consequences of your actions, even if that means getting in trouble with authority figures. While the cause, a rock concert, may have been dubious, and there were other, legal options, the kids eventually decided to stand up for what they believed in. It is refreshing that the kids didn't get off the hook just because everyone had fun.

There's a jab a adult hypocrisy, as well. Students aren't allowed to be up on the school roof (presumably for safety reasons), yet Coach Tugnut routinely cooks his lunch up there. The rules do not always apply to those who enforce them. That is not exactly a lesson one would expect from Disney fare.

I really enjoy ES and still watch the repeats of the show. The Even Stevens Movie was someone's bad idea to transform a show that perfectly used the half-hour sitcom format into a bloated TV movie. I watched the movie when it debuted and have seen it a few times since, but it has little of the charm of the series. As some fans have said on the message boards, the "Leavin' Stevens" final episode of the series was better than the movie.

I believe that the premise of "Leavin' Stevens" would have made a much better finale than the reality-show nonsense of the movie. In "Leavin' Stevens," Louis and Ren's mother, a state senator, is elected to federal office. It appears that the family will have to move to Washington, D.C. (For some reason they have to leave right away). Ren tries to get a new best friend for her buddies Monique and Ruby, while Louis and Tawny skirt around their feelings for one another. All of that happens with ES' trademark silliness and absurdity mixed with touches of cuteness. Ren finds a girl who is a parody of herself and who practically drives Monique and Ruby crazy. Louis and Tawny end up declaring their love for one another via a mix-up with video tapes. The episode could have been expanded to an hour and been a fitting tribute to the series without Disney feeling the need to make a movie, especially the one that was made.

The Even Stevens Movie takes a lot of wrong turns. It is difficult to know where to begin. When I asked my younger sister, who had recently confessed to watching "all the Disney shows," whether she was planning to watch the ES movie, she replied: "I don't know if I could take two hours of them." She had a good point. One of the strengths of the show was how well it used the half-hour format. The first ten minutes set up the premise--sometimes involving multiple storylines. Just before the break, Louis (or Ren) would get that uh-oh look on his (or her) face. After the break, hijinks would ensue due to whatever mess he (or she) had gotten into. Everything would come to a quick resolution before the closing tag. A half-hour is just long enough to watch ES' quick cuts, odd-camera angles, non-sequiturs, fantasy sequences and lightning speed plot developments. Much more time than that would put viewers into sensory overload. (One exception would be the "Leavin' Stevens" episode, which relied less on the usual tricks than most other eps).

The producers of the movie must have thought the series would not translate well into a longer format. So they came up with a premise that removed the family from its usual environment. In so doing, they removed the what was charming about the series from the movie. With a few changes, The Even Stevens Movie could have been a movie with characters from Lizzie Maguire or That's So Raven. ES, the series, was primarily about Louis, Ren, and their having to find their way in their own little world. That world mostly revolved around their friends and their lives at school. I believe that the series illustrated how kids are left to their own devices in today's world. ES, like many shows that revolve around kids, took that to an extreme, perhaps. The series was almost a live-action Archie comic with the characters transplanted from high school to junior high. As in the Archie comics, the parents and siblings are mostly on the periphery, occasionally brought on stage to propel the narrative or for gags. It was Twitty, Tawny, Tom, Principal Wexler, Coach Tugnut, Monique, Ruby, and Larry Beale who were integral to most of the episodes of the series. The movie reverses that balance by having the family unit predominate while the friends and school officials are reduced to watching the action from the sidelines. If the powers that be thought it would be good for the movie to send the characters on location, they could have had Louis and Ren go on a school field trip. At least that way, Twitty et al. could have had more involvement with the action, and the movie would have bore some resemblance to the series upon which it was based.

The movie opens with a couple of pointless gags that are supposed to be vintage Louis, I suppose. In the first scene, Louis and Beans unleash a beach ball full of spaghetti at Ren's junior high graduation ceremony. Later, Louis shows off his automated lounger to his friends. His chair allows him to watch TV and eat junk food to his heart's content without ever having to get up. Naturally, the chair short circuits while Ren is in it, leaving her covered with chocolate sauce and ready to chop Louis' head off. On the series, those gags would have been used to propel the plot, and Louis would have learned his lesson--at least for that week. In the movie, the only purpose they served was to illustrate that Ren and Louis are constantly at each other's throats. Of course, by the end, Ren and Louis work together to pull a fast one on the smarmy host of the reality show they have unwittingly been on. So, we know they don't really hate each other. Um, is that anything new?

Another glaring problem with the ES movie was the aging of everyone, especially Shia LaBeouf, Christy Carlson Romano, and Nick Spano. LaBeouf and Romano were barely believable as junior high students by the later episodes of the series. Obviously some time had elapsed between the filming of the last season of the show and the making of the movie. Louis and Ren looked like they should have been about to enter college or the work world. Donnie might have been married with three kids. (When I first started watching ES, I actually thought that Donnie had been laid off from work, forcing him to return home to live with his parents. I recall asking my Disney Channel loving sister, "Girl, the older brother who's all old on Evens Stevens, how old is he supposed to be?" She didn't know. It was only upon seeing the movie that I realized he was supposed to be in high school. Later, I saw other episodes of the show that confirmed that Donnie was only a few years older than Ren and Louis. I realized that Donnie looking "all old" was a running gag. At least, I hoped so). Anyway, it was hard to believe that people their ages would act so immaturely. Now that my sibs and I are adults, we never have silly disagreements :)

Disney also made a mistake in its promotion of the ES movie. They let the audience in on the joke by revealing that the family was tricked into taking part in a reality show. That left few surprises for viewers, except at the end, which was more a cute twist than a surprise.

The movie had some funny moments, to be sure. Tim Meadows was perfectly cast as the sleazy reality show host. He must have watched Jeff Probst on Survivor to prepare for the role. Ultimately, however, I felt that The Even Stevens Movie was an excuse for Disney to make another "original" TV movie to add to its nightly rotation.