Suite Life

I don’t pretend to understand why some kids’ shows succeed and others fail. The Disney Channel/Family Channel has had a lot of shows that were better and smarter than The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, with more appealing stars than the Sprouse Twins. (It’s not just that they’re not very likable performers; they can’t, or at least don’t, convey different personalities even when the scripts call for them to be different — they are twins who project exactly the same character, which was probably useful back when they were actually taking turns playing the same characters.) But The Suite Life became one of the Disney Channel’s signature hits, and they’re continuing it this fall with a new location and a new title: The Suite Life On Deck, the same show except on a boat. And without the mother, bringing the kids’ fantasy element up another notch. (The appeal of the show was that it allowed two kids to run around a fancy hotel. Now they’re running around a fancy ship and they have an additional element that viewers will envy: no parents at all.) Basically this is just a way for the producers to continue the show even though they’ve passed the 65-episode mark, at which point Disney usually discontinues its kids’ shows. (The theory is that once you have enough episodes to “strip” the show and run it every day, you don’t need any more, because kids have an insatiable appetite for reruns.) But the only good thing about the original show was the odd-couple interplay of Maddie (Ashley Tisdale) and London (Brenda Song), and since Tisdale is no longer available to the producers — except for one guest-star episode — it’s all kind of pointless.