Wizards of Waverly Place
Disney Channel's late-2000s flagship spent four seasons turning Selena Gomez into a household name and making millions of kids believe they could be teenage wizards living above a Greenwich Village sandwich shop. The premise was simple and tight: three wizard siblings, one family competition, and only one of them gets to keep the magic.
Wizards of Waverly Place premiered on October 12, 2007, created by Todd J. Greenwald as a Disney Channel fantasy sitcom centered on Alex Russo (Selena Gomez) and her two brothers, Justin (David Henrie) and Max (Jake T. Austin). The family lived above the Waverly Sub Station — a sandwich shop styled like a subway station — in Greenwich Village, and their father Jerry, a former wizard himself, taught the kids magic in a secret lair below. The setup was both mundane and extraordinary: a real family, a real shop, real magic just out of reach of the paying customers.
The spine of the show was an elegantly cruel premise: someday the three siblings would compete in the family wizard competition, and only one would keep their powers. The show ran four seasons and 106 episodes, through January 2012, without ever letting that tension go slack, while the theme song — "Everything Is Not What It Seems," sung by Gomez herself — played the same note: nothing was quite what it appeared.
In the finale, Alex won the competition; Justin kept his powers anyway when he was named headmaster of the wizard school WizTech; Max got the sandwich shop. Along the way the show collected three Emmys for Outstanding Children's Program — 2009 and 2012 for the series, 2010 for the 2009 TV movie, at the time the second most-viewed Disney Channel Original Movie premiere ever, behind High School Musical 2. The series finale became the most-watched final episode of any Disney Channel series. A 2013 special, The Wizards Return: Alex vs. Alex, reunited most of the cast, and a sequel series, Wizards Beyond Waverly Place — Henrie starring, Gomez recurring — ran from 2024 to 2026. But 2007 to 2012 is when it mattered most: the years a generation watched Gomez become a star and believed, at least on Waverly Place, that the magic was real.
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