You think you could get away for a long weekend without basic cable changing forever, but apparently not. When family members are feeding you Nielson ratings via text messages, you know something’s up. Such is the case with High School Musical 2, the sequel to last year’s made-for-TV movie that spawned the most successful album of 2006, a worldwide tour, a new stable of teen celebrities and a flippin’ ice show. It may very well be the most accidentally lucrative thing to ever happen to Disney, and now that the newest installment brought in a record-breaking 17.2 million viewers during the first airing, an end to this phenomenon is not in the foreseeable future.

A long time fan of Disney’s monthly TV movies, I found the original charming enough, but the hullabaloo that ensued remains a bit mind-boggling for me. The HSM demographic is a generation that’s been raised by the internet; culture (and smut) has been more readily available to them than anyone their senior. One would assume that an Up With People troupe, clad entirely in hyper colors, singing about love and cooperation might be too sugary [read: gay] for a group of kids so prematurely/rightfully skeptical.

Mysteries aside, the new installment of what is officially at least a trilogy upped the scope and production value from the first, while sticking to a considerably infinitesimal budget. No longer being able to rely on an actual high school musical to serve as the background for the Broadway shenanigans, HSM2 finds the cast on summer vacation and conveniently working at the same high-end country club (think Saved By The Bell’s summer at Malibu Sands plus DANCING! minus Leah Remini). Some of the songs were a little over thought and the setting of an actual school building is sorely missed, but besides one moment of the inhumanly tan Zac Efron singing to his CGI reflection in a water hazard, nothing was aggressively bad. There is a highpoint, and it comes a little too soon when Ashley Tisdale sings what basically amounts to a glammed-out version of Veruca Salt’s “I Want It Now”. Tisdale’s overacting is the most enjoyable part of the film, and her bitchiness is a welcome respite from her costars’ cotton candy smiles.

The real torture of Friday night came during commercial breaks when the director, cast and two people I’m not sure had anything to do with the movie offered their painfully scripted, saccharine narration about how gee golly swell making High School Musical 2 really was. We can only pray that the DVD might make up for all the artificial sweetness with behind the scenes extras of director Kenny Ortega sexually harassing Efron or the cast doing lines at the wrap party.