Hannah Montana turns 20 this year, and the kids who came home from school and put it on are now the doctors, the managers, the people running things. Katelyn Thomas was 12 when it started. She is now a reporter, a mom, and she will absolutely be showing it to her son.

What does it feel like to come home from a hard day at school, sit down, and watch a show where a girl in a blonde wig was somehow the biggest pop star in the world and nobody noticed? Katelyn Thomas calls it an escape. Not therapy. Not a lesson. Just half an hour where the things that were hard stopped mattering for a while. That ritual was doing more work than anyone realized at the time.

Miley Cyrus went through a phase that was hard to watch and came out the other side with a voice nobody else has and an authenticity that Katelyn Thomas finds genuinely easy to respect. The growing pains were the show’s thesis all along.

Topics: Hannah Montana 20th anniversary, Miley Cyrus millennial nostalgia, Disney Channel, millennials in leadership, TV as childhood escape

GUEST: Katelyn Thomas, Montreal Gazette

Originally aired on2026-03-25