The 15 Best Disney Channel Shows Of The 2000s, Ranked

Although Disney Channel has existed since 1983, its slate of original programming only dates back as far as the late ’90s, when the concept of Disney Channel Originals started to rise — gradually overtaking the syndicated shows that originally took up most of the programming grid. In other words, the story of Disney Channel in the 2000s is the very story of how Disney’s official TV hub came into its own as a brand.

If you look at the network’s original shows from this period, there’s a fascinating trajectory from tentative experiments at the turn of the century to more famous, more consolidated hits in the late 2000s, with both the Disney Channel sitcom and the Disney Channel original cartoon taking shape in real time as the institutions they now are. Though it’s sometimes held in lower critical esteem than rivals like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, Disney Channel put out plenty of great TV in the first decade of the 21st century. That’s why we’ve compiled a ranking of the best Disney Channel shows of the 2000s. So buckle up, and get ready for some nostalgia. 

“Lilo & Stitch” was one of the best Disney films of the 2000s. Its balance of whimsy, creativity, local color, and genuinely affecting small-scale storytelling made for a wholly unique blend within the Disney catalog — something almost Ghibli-like. It was no wonder that it captured the imaginations of kids, nor that it was developed into a proper, full-fledged franchise (this being still, of course, Disney, and not Ghibli).

Bookended by two feature-length films that served as a pilot and a finale, “Lilo & Stitch: The Series” follows Lilo (Daveigh Chase) and Stitch (Chris Sanders) as they track down Jumba’s (David Ogden Stiers) experiments all over Hawaii and struggle to both keep them from wreaking havoc and find a way to integrate them into human society. Plots are varied and engaging, Gantu’s (Kevin Michael Richardson) grumpy villain-and-sidekick dynamic with X-625 (Rob Paulsen) is winning, and the animation is much better than it needed to be. Mostly, though, the show just works irreproachably as an excuse to dive back into the film’s cozy world.

One of the earliest original live-action shows to bear the Disney logo was “Even Stevens,” a single-camera family sitcom that ran for three seasons between 2000 and 2003 — a highly successful bow for a Disney Channel production, especially then. The show, while far from revolutionary, was a solid and reliably entertaining slice of family-friendly storytelling, doused in a warm Sacramento haze that made it pleasantly real, grounded, and specific even as the characters got up to typically goofy kids’-sitcom antics.

Arguably best-remembered as the show that introduced the world to Shia LaBeouf — and won him a Daytime Emmy, the only letter so far in his potential EGOT — “Even Stevens” had a strong cast across the board, who managed to make the stories of Louis (LaBeouf) and Ren Stevens’ (Christy Carlson Romano) home and school lives alike feel consistently believable. The show is also notable for helping codify the “classic” early-2000s family sitcom aesthetic, complete with colorful sets and costumes, fisheye lenses, and sped-up photography.

Perhaps the most offbeat animated series ever produced by Disney Channel, “The Buzz on Maggie” was not exactly an audience hit, nor is it particularly well-remembered, even among the channel’s most fervently nostalgic old fans. But let the record show that it was a smart, amusingly cranky little show that deserved more attention.

Following Maggie (Jessica DiCicco) — a teenage fly experiencing the pitfalls of growing up in a society of flies closely mirroring, naturally, American everyday life — “The Buzz on Maggie” was surprisingly satirical for a Disney show. Maggie, while not exactly a beacon of sympathy, was a more engagingly abrasive protagonist than kids’ shows can usually afford, and the show’s sociological snark and proclivity for gross-out humor made it an arguable predecessor to the wave of experimental cartoons of the 2010s. In fact, maybe “The Buzz on Maggie” would have thrived on Cartoon Network; in the Disney stable, it feels like a fascinating outlier.

Sometimes, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than “striking premise, clear comedic setup, diligent execution.” The premise: A dog and a rabbit are dropped from a cargo airplane and land on an uninhabited island, where they will have to learn to survive in the wild. The comedic setup: Brandy (Kaley Cuoco, years before playing “The Big Bang Theory’s” Penny) the dog, is a spoiled Palm Beach golden retriever; the rabbit Mr. Whiskers (Charlie Adler) is a dimwitted derelict who was on his way to a zoo where he’d be sold for 39 cents.

You’d think all signs would point to Brandy being the fish out of water among the wild beasts and daily trials of the jungle, while Mr. Whiskers would be the malleable wildcard who can adapt to any crazy situation. But that’s where the execution comes in: “Brandy & Mr. Whiskers” keeps springing for expectation-twisting farcical scenarios and finding hilarious riffs on the established personalities of its two antiheroes. Add a cast of charismatic jungle animals, a “Spongebob”-esque taste for surrealism, and a genuinely affecting budding-friendship tale, and you’ve got a winner.

On paper, “a ‘That’s So Raven’ spin-off about Cory Baxter living in the White House while his father gets a job as the personal chef to the President” reads like one of those desperate spin-off ideas that reek of stretching things too thin. In practice, “Cory in the House” turned out to be one of the most purely fun and hilarious live-action shows ever produced by Disney Channel.

In addition to the grounding central performance of Kyle Massey, himself as much of a superstar as Raven-Symoné, “Cory in the House” boasted a vibrant, game cast of teens and adults who all seemed perfectly keyed in on the right tone for its “politics-as-slapstick” premise. Everything on the show always seemed just shy of actually serious, from C.I.A. secrets to run-ins with diplomats, yet the hovering joke was the idea that Washington D.C. political life could be turned into a circus of goofy kid-friendly humor. Not until “Veep” would another show treat American politics with such replenishing disrespect.

For a channel that was literally intended as a home for the Disney brand, the Disney Channel didn’t actually dabble in fantasy adventure as much as you’d think it would — that being the bread-and-butter of its parent studio and all. One instance of a Disney Channel show that did opt for that genre instead of sticking to the sitcom-adjacent structures of most of its peers was “American Dragon: Jake Long.”

As its title suggests, the show tells of an American teenage boy (Dante Basco) who belongs to a lineage of half-dragon humans and learns to wield his dragon powers with proficiency in order to become a guardian to a whole undercover population of mythical creatures in New York City. A high watermark of Asian representation in American kids’ TV of the 2000s, the show synthesized Chinese and American culture into a seamlessly-constructed inner world. Full of energy, excitement, and compelling kid-oriented longform storytelling, it evoked the spirit of the best adventure cartoons of the mid-to-late 20th century — but with a significantly more interesting aesthetic frame of inspiration.

Long before Selena Gomez was garnering Primetime Emmy nominations and Oscar buzz for her acting work and becoming the richest Disney Channel star by a mile, she was already proving herself as an unusually sly and intelligent Disney Channel teen actor on “Wizards of Waverely Place” — a show that would never have worked without Gomez bringing the exact right combination of refined deadpan and affable charm to it.

Structured like a family sitcom but suffused with a healthy degree of storytelling abandon, the show used the concept of wizarding and magic as an effective way to concoct elaborate farcical plots and impart persuasive lessons week after week. It was the most adult-friendly live-action sitcom ever released by Disney, with an emphasis on smart writing and thoughtful plotting that nabbed it consistent acclaim outgrew it.

In 2001, the Bruce W. Smith-created “The Proud Family” was twice a trailblazer: Not only was it the first original Disney Channel animated series ever, but it was one of the first American animated series to be wholly centered around a Black family.

Given the momentousness of what it represented, “The Proud Family” could have settled for being a broad, straight-down-the-middle show about a typical suburban family that “just happened to be Black,” and it would still have been revolutionary. Instead, the show made a point of rendering Black American life with specificity, witty humor, and real-world seriousness; although it occasionally tripped over comedic stereotypes that now feel dated, it was the first TV reflection of culturally relatable experiences for millions of Black kids across the U.S.

Not that the show’s value came down to mere representation, mind you. Straight out the gate, it was already a high watermark for Disney Channel in terms of writing and animation, with one of the most compelling and lived-in family dynamics ever seen on the channel, and a sharp view of suburban life that few of its successors have matched.

If there was one element of Disney Channel live-action sitcoms that hindered their appeal among older audiences, it was their tendency to rely on zany, absurdist, pratfall-based humor and cartoony characterizations. But then there was “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” — a show that knew exactly what it was, committed to it wholeheartedly, and found ways to elevate dumb humor to an art form.

The environment of the Tipton Hotel, for one thing, was the sort of playful, anarchic, Jacques Tati-like setting that allowed for endless comedic variation within familiar parameters. On top of that, the show’s older cast — headed by Brenda Song, Ashley Tisdale, Kim Rhodes, and Phill Lewis — was uniformly excellent, and counterbalanced the sugar-rush mischief of the titular twins themselves (Cole and Dylan Sprouse) with a hefty amount of adult-friendly wit. When those two strengths combined to their fullest, “The Suite Life” was the funniest live-action Disney show, bar none.

The most unique of all Disney Channel sitcoms, “Lizzie McGuire” is a relic of a time when the network had yet to figure out its TV production line, and thus even the biggest financial bets had more room to try things out. It wasn’t as consistently laugh-out-loud hilarious as the best exemplars of the post-“That’s So Raven” multi-camera boom, nor was it as concerned with appealing to toddlers. But for the older kids and tweens taking their first steps into adolescence, it was nothing short of a godsend.

“Lizzie McGuire” had a simple but undeniably effective premise: Diving deep into the thoughts, feelings, and worries of a 13-year-old girl growing into herself. The mission to express Lizzie’s inner life was facilitated not only by Hilary Duff herself in a solar, star-making performance, but by the unique framing device of having the character’s cartoon self give monologues directly to the audience. Funny, fresh, and relatable, it was the rare Disney show with enough genuine substance to sustain a theatrical film adaptation — and a good one at that.

“The Emperor’s New Groove” was Disney’s biggest fluke ever: a hail-mary effort to rescue a catastrophic epic musical production by revamping it into a cheap Looney Tunes-esque comedy, somehow resulting in the most underrated Disney movie ever, a new landmark of the studio’s canon, and arguably the funniest animated film of all time. It was a gamble that had no right to work, let alone twice. And yet, six years later, the TV spin-off “The Emperor’s New School” was released — and proved to be nearly as bold, hilarious, and off-kilter as the film.

Centered on the bizarre premise of Kuzco having to graduate high school in order to become emperor, the series essentially uses that plot and its various ramifications as a clothesline on which to hang gags on top of gags, pushing the meta abandon to even greater extremes while gleefully repeating everything fun about “Groove” — and then making the repetition part of the joke. David Spade is replaced by J. P. Manoux, but Eartha Kitt, Patrick Warburton, and John Goodman (in season 2, following a one-season replacement by Fred Tatasciore) all come back as sharp as ever. High school plots aside, it’s all more of the same, but when the formula is so winning, that’s hardly a detriment.

A lot of kids’ television throughout the 20th century lived by the dictum that action and adventure were a boys’ realm. It speaks to the cultural impact of “Kim Possible” that it now makes that stereotype look so ancient. Arguably the single most iconic action animated series of the 2000s, it was the show that truly established the Disney brand in television animation and made Disney Channel a force to be reckoned with.

The key to the show’s success, to put it succinctly, was taking things seriously. Created by Disney Channel veterans Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle, who had to navigate their share of unhelpful studio notes, “Kim Possible” struck a careful, thoughtful balance between engaging spy fiction, adult-friendly dry humor, and genuinely engaging high school storytelling steeped in relatable personal stakes. Kim Possible (Christy Carlson Romano) herself was the perfect tween heroine, at once aspirationally badass and relatably vulnerable, and the show’s sprawling retrofuturist world was the coolest thing in the 2000s Disney oeuvre this side of “Atlantis.”

The clear best of all the teen sitcoms launched by Disney in the 2000s was “That’s So Raven.” It was the show that started it all, really, consolidating the zany multi-camera sitcom model for a new generation of kids. The show’s secret, in three words: Being absolutely hilarious. Or, to put it even more briefly, in just one word: Raven-Symoné.

Although “That’s So Raven” was a high-concept fantasy series that employed its clairvoyant hook for maximum chaos week after week, at its heart, it was essentially a high school-meets-family sitcom built on slapstick and misunderstanding — and the tireless, prodigious commitment of its star made it what it is. Raven-Symoné was the whole package, a beacon of charisma who could pull off any feat of physical comedy thrown her way, while also elevating each of the show’s trademark forays into disguise- and impersonation-based humor.

Thanks to her and to a similarly talented ensemble, “That’s So Raven” was able to push itself to delirious heights of comedy that still merit hearty laughs two decades later; no wonder it became such a massive hit as to permanently transform Disney Channel and teen sitcoms overall.

Although Disney Channel had its share of hits in the early 2000s, it struggled for some time to launch an epic, iconic, inexhaustible freeform cartoon that could keep ratings and merchandising sales flowing for years and years and years, as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network managed multiple times throughout the ’90s and 2000s. The network finally found its goldmine in 2007, in a certain animated comedy about two trying to have a good time during summer vacation.

With episodes built on the kind of fixed, repetitive structure that Golden Age cartoons used to thrive in — Phineas (Vincent Martella) and Ferb (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) find something crazy to do; they bring their friends into the fold; Candace (Ashley Tisdale) tries to foil them but fails at the nick of time; Perry the Platypus (Dee Bradley Baker) handles some ridiculous altercation with Dr. Doofenshmirtz (Dan Povenmire) in the B-plot — the show channeled most of its creative energy towards the animation, the gags, the massive world-building, and of course, the songs.

For all the requisite checkboxes, any given episode of “Phineas and Ferb” was its own lively, exuberant thing, with its own no-reason-to-be-this-good tunes to worm their way into kids’ and adults’ ears alike. Even more extraordinary was the show’s commitment to being warm, good-natured, and utterly non-cynical in its tonal approach, without once compromising its nimble postmodern wit.

If we told you that the closest thing to a Monty Python movie in the 21st century was a Disney Channel show, would you believe it? Sadly, there’s a non-negligible chance that you wouldn’t, if only because so few people saw “Dave the Barbarian” that large swaths of the public are still ignorant of its existence. But yes, there you have it: This forgotten, commercially nonexistent little Disney show was TV’s greatest work of medieval satire in a minute.

The premise is simple: In the Middle Ages, the King (Kevin Michael Richardson) and Queen of Udrogoth (Erica Luttrell) have left their post to fight evil around the world, leaving their three bumbling kids (Danny Cooksey, Luttrell, and Tress MacNeille) to take care of the kingdom in their absence. Aided by their incompetent sorcerer uncle (Richardson) and a sassy talking sword (Estelle Harris), the kids get into every stock medieval adventure in the book while facing off against Chuckles the Silly Piggy (Paul Rugg), the world’s grumpiest yet least menacing arch-villain.

Each of the 21 episodes ramps up the goofy, sophisticated, anything-goes humor more and more; this is the kind of show where the narrator routinely argues with the characters — and then, just as you’ve gotten used to that level of insanity, the villain goes and kidnaps the narrator. It was the smartest, funniest, most incredible thing to come out of Disney Channel in its first 25 years of existence — even if virtually nobody watched it.