When So Weird first started on the Disney Channel, I was afraid that it would be like most everything else they air; silly storylines, bad special effects, no real sense of suspense or drama and aimed at little kids. I was pleasantly surprised when I watched the pilot episode. The show was well written and was taken very seriously. Scenes like the one in which Fiona comes face to face with a ghost, or where the ghost looks out at her from a photo on her computer screen were very well done and even managed to give me a slight case of the creeps.
The show continued to turn out some excellent episodes, with the best being (in my opinion) Angel, Rebecca, Lost, Medium, Mutiny, Banshee, Strange Geometry and Twin. There were a few silly episodes, Simplicity, Boo, Troll and Shelter, but even those were fairly well done.
Then for the third season, they replaced Cara DeLizia as Fiona with Alexz Johnson as Annie Thelan, switched to a different co-production company and apparently hired a bunch of grade-schoolers to be the new writers. None of the third season episodes have any suspense or drama at all and you can see every plot twist coming from a mile away.
Where Fiona used to search out the supernatural, Annie just kind of blunders into it week after week. In an incredibly weak attempt to keep the character of Fiona active on the show, Annie has to e-mail her for advice about every single problem she encounters. Of course you never see her, they just use her name.
The first episode of the third season had Fiona in it to explain why she was leaving and to hand the show off to Annie. After that, it just went downhill fast. The first episode with Annie as the star, Talking Board, had me groaning at how incredibly bad it was. Since then, the third season has produced maybe three decent episodes, Voodoo (which went way overboard with the special effects), Exit 13 and Still Life. The rest of the episodes are everything I feared the show would be when I first heard about it. It's as if they suddenly told the writers "Make every story so simple that even a 5 year old can understand it." While watching the episode Grave Mistake, anyone over the age of 8 will figure out the twist in the first five minutes and spend the rest of the episode wondering how the characters in the show can be so dumb as to not get it.
Disney had a good thing going in the first two seasons of So Weird, but they ruined it. I feel the show could have survived the cast change and I have nothing against Alexz Johnson, but as it is, the third season just plain stinks.
