Review on Zoey 102 ( 2023)

i've watched this movie at least 20 times this year and last year

One of the pleasures of watching Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 as a tween was the series’ idealization of independence. Set at the fictional boarding school Pacific Coast Academy, the Dan Scheinder-producedshow centered on a confident, precocious teen named Zoey Brooks (Jamie Lynn Spears) and her rotating door of roommates (R.I.P. Dana), friends, and boyfriends as they navigated their teenage years away from their homes.

It gave college hopefuls a glimpse of living in a dorm and kids, who simply wanted to escape the reign of the parents, an extremely comfortable portrait of adult-like freedom. As with many children’s programs, the kids’ financial stability was a given.

It’s only appropriate, then, that a reboot set in the adult world would flip this fantasy on its head. In the new sequel film Zoey 102 (now on Paramount+), the former most popular girl at PCA appears to have seemingly peaked in high school. Zoey 102 is essentially a redo of Zoey 101’s series finale, suffused with rom-com clichés. Most of the film takes place during the leadup to Logan (Matthew Underwood) and Quinn’s (Erin Sanders) wedding where most of Zoey’s classmates—minus a few notable faces, like Lola (Victoria Justice) and Nicole (Alexa Nikolas)—reunite. The fact that brainiac Quinn is settling down with Logan, who doesn’t seem to have matured much since PCA, is just as concerning as Zoey’s obsession with Chase. However, in classic rom-com fashion, her life is positioned as more aspirational than Zoey’s, because Quinn’s in a relationship.

That said, the fact that Quinn is getting married to her high-school lover and that Chase, who also attends the wedding, has a girlfriend sends Zoey spiraling down a path of bad decisions. Embarrassed about her singledom, Zoey tells the bridal party, including her nerdy former classmate Stacey (Abby Wilde), that she has a boyfriend. After Quinn puts her down for a plus-one, Zoey’s forced to hire an actor to pretend to be her date at the wedding.

On the same day as Quinn and Logan’s wedding, she also has to attend the taping of her show’s finale, after begging her boss to be added to the live team. The film tries its best to make the stakes of Zoey’s work life feel just as important as the state of her love life. But the sexism she experiences in the workplace is tackled in a cursory manner, and the film doesn’t seem to take reality TV seriously as a genre. Zoey 102 is like most modern reboots that aren’t nearly as satisfying as watching the original product. Maybe if the film were willing to tackle the anxieties of modern womanhood in a more specific, less superficial way, it would at least give viewers the opportunity to be surprised. Instead, it does exactly what the original show did: present a generic, sanitized view of adulthood. This time, though, it’s less like a fantasy and simply just inaccurate. 

 Zoey 102  is a movie sequel to the hit 2000s teen dramedy series Zoey 101. Star Jamie Lynn Spears and almost everyone from cast of the original show -- which aired from 2005-2008 on Nickelodeon -- returns. Themes of the movie include friendship, teamwork, and the importance of honesty. The movie's content is tween-friendly overall, but you can expect some social drinking/partying by adults, kissing, and characters waking up in bed together. An underlying storyline is that a killer is on the loose in Santa Monica, and a victim is shown in a body bag.