Gonna be honest — there was a day when Disney and Disney Channel movies were epic.
They were cheesy. The CGI was bad. The scripts were often horrible. And we could not look away. It didn’t matter how old you were. If you grew up on Disney movies, you knew they were a good time.
I think what we’ve lost isn’t quality, exactly. It’s a specific kind of sincerity. Those movies weren’t trying to be prestige, they weren’t winking at you, and they weren’t built to be clipped for social. They were built to be watched on a couch in the middle of the afternoon with total commitment to a premise that made no sense. There’s a real difference between a movie that’s bad and a movie that’s unembarrassed, and we mostly stopped making the second kind.
I’ll be honest about this too — I don’t remember everything about Aquamarine. But I know I love a mermaid story, and so, give me a sequel. I am here for it.
A sequel series? Don’t threaten us with a good time.
What we know
Both Jake McDorman and Emma Roberts are set to return, with McDorman back as Raymond in a series regular capacity and Roberts returning as Claire Brown as a guest star and executive producer.
The logline, “When teenaged Coral moves to a dreamy seaside town, she begins unraveling the truth behind her mother’s disappearance — and discovers her mother was a mermaid, awakening magical powers in Coral just as secrets beneath the waves threaten to surface.”
And here’s the detail that got me, because it changes what this show actually is, Coral is Raymond and Aquamarine’s (Sarah Paxton) daughter. They stayed together after the movie ended. They had a kid. And at some point, she disappeared.
Which is such a bold thing to do to a beloved ending. The original was a story about a mermaid getting the boy. This is the story of what it cost. They didn’t reboot the movie — they aged it, and they let the happily ever after become complicated the way real ones do. Raymond is a single dad now, still carrying the absence of a woman who might not have been able to stay. That’s a genuinely heavier premise than anyone expected from a 2006 mermaid comedy, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
the good kind of coming-of-age
14-year-old Kenzi Richardson will play Coral, described as a “thoughtful and artistic teenager who discovers she is half mermaid and must navigate adolescence, identity and the absence of the mother she never knew.”
That sentence is doing more work than a logline usually does, and it’s why I think this could be great rather than just nostalgic. Being half of something is the most useful metaphor a teenage girl story can have. Not fully belonging to either world, not sure which parts of yourself came from where. The mermaid part isn’t the story. The mermaid part is the vocabulary for the story.
The absent mother angle gives it real stakes. Coral isn’t just figuring out who she is. She’s assembling herself out of a woman she never met, trying to figure out the different parts of herself, and figuring out who she is without a mother that she so desperately wants.
The rest of the cast
Briella Guiza, Theodore Dalton and Annika Reese are also set to star.
Guiza plays Mia, Coral’s edgy and fiercely authentic best friend, who challenges Coral’s desire to fit in. Dalton is August, a charming surfer whose emotional depth draws Coral in. And Reese plays Paige, the queen bee of the beach club — but the release specifies she’s “not your typical mean girl.”
Those three descriptions are, honestly, a small thesis statement. The best friend who pushes back against wanting to be liked. The love interest whose appeal is that he feels things. The mean girl who isn’t just mean. Every one of those is a deliberate correction of the 2006 version of the same role, and taken together they suggest a show that wants the warmth of the original without the flatness. The archetypes are intact and the characters inside them got upgraded.
I’m especially glad about the Mia dynamic, because “wanting to fit in” is the actual conflict for a girl who’s half something. Coral’s secret and her insecurity are two sides of the same problem, and giving her a friend who refuses to shrink is how you help her through everything.
The people behind it
Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, who directed the original film, is returning to direct the pilot, with Sarah Watson of The Bold Type writing.
That combination is the most encouraging news in the whole announcement. Rosenbaum knows the tone — she’s the one who made the first one feel the way it felt. Watson writes young women with the actual ability to grow, learn and with actual depth. The Bold Type took people and let them be complicated. If you wanted someone to take a cheesy mermaid premise seriously without stripping the joy out of it, that’s the hire.
We can’t wait to see what happens with this one.
Bring us back to the days of classic Disney cheesiness and greatness — the sincerity, the sea foam, the total lack of irony. Give a teenage girl a magical problem and let her actually feel things about it.
We’re here for it.
