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Introduction

Lizzie McGuire is a popular children's sitcom which aired on the Disney Channel. New episodes aired between January 2001 and February 2004, totalling 65 episodes divided into two seasons. Reruns continued daily for a long time afterward. There was also a feature film taking place right after the end of the series.

This timeline attempts to place in chronological order the events occurring or mentioned in the series. A large number of events that happened in the years prior to those actually covered by the series are mentioned at some point or other in the course of the show. Several of them involve people throwing up in embarrassing places. For a small number of events, a specific year is actually mentioned on the show. For everything else, dates need to be inferred logically from other facts, and some (possibly incorrect) starting assumptions need to be made.

To begin with, I started by presuming that most of the episodes take place approximately at the time they were originally filmed (which is in a somewhat different order from the order the episodes actually aired), with the exception of a few episodes with holiday or seasonal references that are inconsistent with this timing, and hence had to be re-ordered in the continuity. This places Season 1, in which Lizzie and her classmates are in the 7th grade, in the 2000-2001 school year. Season 2 covers the 2001-2002 school year, and ends with Lizzie about to graduate from 8th grade. The movie takes place in 2002 (although it was released in 2003) and features her graduation and subsequent class trip.

Pegging these two years like this allows earlier events referring to specific grades of Lizzie and others in her class to be dated as well, though they may be off by one since school years stretch across two calendar years and it's not always clear whether an event took place early or late in the school year.

Then you get to events that are pegged to specific ages of people. Nobody's birthday is precisely stated, though it's possible to infer some approximate order from the occasional references to characters celebrating their birthday. When her age is mentioned, Lizzie is said to be 13 during the first season and 14 during the second. This seems to be one year older than she ought to be in 7th and 8th grade, though it could depend on what month her birthday is, and when the cutoff date is for school enrollment in her district. At any rate, it's possible to work backward from there to give approximate dates for events that occurred when she was particular ages in the past, which could be off by a year depending on when her birthday is.

Matt is said to be three grades behind Lizzie, so his timeline can be worked out similarly. Kate is in the same grade as Lizzie, but was held back in kindergarten, so she is actually a year older. Some facts are given about the kids' parents and grandparents that allow some inferences to be made about their lives as well. Occasionally, an actual historic event is referred to which can be dated exactly. Years are shown in this chronology if they're either given exactly, or can be inferred within a one-year margin by the sorts of reasoning mentioned here. Items with no year shown are more approximate, and are inserted at a likely point.

Only the TV episodes and feature film are used as source material; the books and other Lizzie items are questionable as canon and are not used here. The spinoff series Stevie Sanchez (also known as What's Stevie Thinking?) would have introduced "facts" that contradict the current Lizzie timeline, particularly having a 12-year-old sister for Miranda when she is only known to have an infant sister now, but although a pilot was apparently filmed (starring Selena Gomez, who has since become a big "Disney girl" star), it never aired, and all that is known about it is from message-board threads of unknown reliability; hence, it should probably not be regarded as canon either. Rumors in 2011 of an upcoming "Lizzie McGuire College Life" series starring Hilary Duff are apparently a hoax, despite a supposed "official announcement" in the form of a graphic posted to various sites.

This should be a useful reference for any fanfic authors wanting to do "Lizzie Prequels"!

(And in 2019 it's been announced that a Lizzie sequel is about to start in the new Disney streaming TV service, so I guess there'll be some more canon to add here!)

The Timeline

A Dan Tobias Production -- © 2005-2019
This page was first created 19 Feb 2005, and was last modified 19 Sep 2019.

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