Hannah Montana's Final Season Was Drastically Changed By Disney

Hannah Montana’s big farewell was supposed to be very different. Writer Douglas Danger Lieblein has revealed the initial plans for the Disney Channel show’s fourth and final season, which had to be changed at the very last minute due to an unexpected demand concerning merchandising. And knowing the original plans for Season 4 after all these years will have you mourning what could have been.

Lieblein opened up about why Season 4 was so tricky for the writing team during the March 31 episode of his Best of Both Our Worlds podcast. “First of all, we didn’t think we were coming back. It was a surprise fourth year, and we had so much to do,” the writer revealed, pointing out that the final season had only been picked up for 13 episodes, less than half the count of all previous seasons.

Because of the shortened time, Lieblein explained that the writers wanted to kick the season off with Hannah revealing her true identity to the world. “We creatively decided we didn’t have any more stories to tell, and we told the network, ‘Hey, what if we do something different? What if in Episode 1, she takes off the wig? And the [13] episodes are an exploration of what life is like if everybody knows the secret.’ And they said, ‘Great! Brilliant!’” Lieblein said.

However, that’s not what ended up airing. In Season 4, Hannah doesn’t reveal her secret until Episode 9, drastically cutting down the exploration of fame that was planned for the farewell storyline. Lieblein revealed that the release schedule was the main reason the season was totally retooled.

“About two or three weeks before we started shooting that season, the network changed their mind,” Lieblein said. “There was a phone call from an executive at the network, who said that they had received an angry phone call from some executive in the merchandising division, because they had just gotten the air schedule. And she was taking the wig off before Halloween, and their concern was, ‘I have a million wigs in a warehouse in China. Who’s going to buy a blonde wig and be Hannah if she takes the wig off?’ So we couldn’t take the wig off until Halloween.”

The Season 4 air dates corroborate this claim. Episode 9 aired one week after Halloween, with every prior episode airing before the holiday.

Though Lieblein said he’s “proud” of how Season 4 turned out, he would’ve preferred more time to really dig into Miley’s life post-reveal. “The fourth season was a mad scramble to get everything we wanted done in a very short amount of time — in half of the season we normally had,” he said. “There’s so much more we would have liked to... we would’ve like to have the send-away that had everyone in it.”