There was no Ashton Kutcher to save “Sonny With a Chance.” When the Disney heiress apparent Demi Lovato went to rehab last fall to deal with “emotional and physical issues,” it left her several careers dangling, none more awkwardly than her role in the sitcom “Sonny,” which seemed destined to collapse without the peppy and wry Ms. Lovato at its center.  The constantly regenerating Disney Channel waits for no starlet, though. “So Random!,” which begins on Sunday, is an act of expediency and continuity, and perhaps necessity. Disney couldn’t continue “Sonny” as is, so it opted not to remake the show on the fly. Instead it took the easy way out, replacing the fictionalized nonfiction of “Sonny” — a “30 Rock”-style metashow about “So Random!,” a teenage sketch-comedy enterprise — with just the fictionalized fiction of “So Random!,” a bunch of clips of kids acting goofy.  It’s as if NBC had announced it would be replacing “30 Rock” with episodes of “TGS With Tracy Jordan” — goodbye, Liz Lemon. Bon voyage, Jack Donaghy. Deuces, Grizz and Dot Com.  Conceptually, at least, it’s a step backward. Disney’s most engaging stars — Miley Cyrus, Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers, Ms. Lovato — have been young people fluent in fame and its wages. Like the best Disney Channel shows, “Sonny” operated both as kid-friendly slapstick and adult-savvy media commentary.  In the Disneyverse, Ms. Lovato was always a bit of an outsider — a little too tough, a little too wacky. Her character on “Sonny” was an Internet star brought in to work on a big hit television show. As Sonny, Ms. Lovato had a blogger-out-of-the-Internet shtick that was that show’s gasoline: she was an outsider on “So Random!,” which itself was the misfit operation in a larger teenage media world. On “Sonny,” “So Random!” existed in the shadow of “McKenzie Falls,” a “Gossip Girl”-style drama with a prettier, crueler cast, headed by the narcissistic Chad Dylan Cooper (Sterling Knight). Now, Chad’s joined the cornballs on “So Random!,” his former nemeses, with no apparent animus or depression.  The “So Random!” sketches weren’t the meat of “Sonny” — they existed largely to get the characters in the same room, and to dress them preposterously — but they were reliably funny. And so it goes here. The debut episode opens with a kid-celeb “Wheel of Fortune” that sends up Willow Smith (Will’s daughter), the hyperactive YouTube phenom Fred Figglehorn and Taylor Swift (played with dippiness by Tiffany Thornton), who turns each conversation into a song about what’s just happened to her. A subsequent sketch, “Helmet Ninjas,” is less a parody of kids’ television than of what overbearing parents would like kids’ television to be.  As with all Disney shows, there’s a farm team of up-and-comers on board, each presumably hoping to be the next Ms. Lovato (as she was in summer 2010). Most promising here is Matthew Scott Montgomery, looking like a 30-year-old jammed into a 12-year-old’s clothes, who plays a whiner in a sketch in which his increasingly absurd excuses for not handing in his homework turn out to be true. There are shades of Pee-wee Herman in his silliness that suggest a skewed intelligence beneath the yuks.  The show’s biggest surprise is the uncharacteristically dark Zombie Man (Damien Haas), who, when confronted about eating a friend’s date to the coming school dance, coughs up some Silly Bandz and shrugs. He then makes up for it by eating — off camera — his friend’s rival for a different girl. Take that, Teen Wolf.  But all the nibbled-on teenagers in the world can’t overcome the fact that the series regulars — formerly Ms. Lovato’s supporting cast, now the stars — who were once flesh and blood are now just silhouettes. Gone is the slapstick relationship between Grady (Doug Brochu, who’s learned too much from Chris Farley) and Nico (the vivid physical comedian Brandon Mychal Smith), or the precocious strangeness of Zora (Allisyn Ashley Arm). Now they’re just famous people on a screen, their inner lives rendered opaque. We all know how that can end.  Disney Channel, Sunday nights at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time.  Produced by Varsity Pictures and It’s a Laugh Productions. Steve Marmel, Michael Feldman, Brian Robbins and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett, executive producers.  WITH: Tiffany Thornton (Tawni Hart), Sterling Knight (Chad Dylan Cooper), Brandon Mychal Smith (Nico Harris), Doug Brochu (Grady Mitchell) and Allisyn Ashley Arm (Zora Lancaster).
The new Disney show âSo Random!â takes the show within âSonny With a Chanceâ and puts it center stage.