Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus fans are used to getting the best of both worlds, as the theme song goes, after watching the 17-year-old songstress juggle her TV and music career for four years. But soon viewers will be singing a very different tune as the show prepares to premiere its fourth, and final, season.
Hannah Montana Forever, premiering on Sunday, July 11 at 8/7c, follows student-by-day, pop-star-by-night Miley Stewart as she and her dad and brother relocate from their Malibu beach house to their new ranch. In addition to the Stewart’s family new digs, the upcoming season will welcome new guest stars including Sheryl Crow, Jay Leno, Kelly Ripa, Ray Liotta and Christine Taylor.
However, the biggest change in the series’ final episodes will be Miley’s graduation from high school, and her struggle to figure out her next move.”[It's about] her graduating, and seeing what college is all about and seeing whether she wants to pursue her career or go to school and try to live a normal life,” Cyrus told reporters at a news conference for the show’s last episodes.
“As the character has grown up, we’ve grown up. As we’ve moved on to new things, they’re moving on to new things, and going to colleges,” she says. “I think we’ve all graduated this year, as well, along with our characters. So I think it is a lot of art imitating life.”
That close link between the Miley’s fictional double life and her real-world star power is something her on-screen and off-screen dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, believes is part of what has made the show so special.
“Before we started rolling film, there was a moment that the writers and producers said every line that refers to Miley as Kiley, change it to Miley,” he says. “I think that that would have taken away a realism of the combination of Miley being Hannah and Hannah being Miley. It just wouldn’t have been the same, if she would have been Kiley.”Reflecting back to those first days on the set back in 2006, Miley says she expected the show to be a hit, but nothing like the phenomenon it became.