I know it’s not a network one goes to for amazing quality or outside the formula TV, but it’s unavoidable to me. When I’m at my parent’s house (the only place I go these days where someone 1) owns a TV and 2) pays for cable) I can’t help but flip to the channel in my idle moments.

Part of it is definitely my own proclivity towards sappy happiness. Everything on Disney is overly, terrifyingly clean and sometimes that niceness is a much-needed break from both my own life and the intense lives of my more dramatic TV shows.

Part of it is that things that I can mock I also find absurdly lovable. I have watched all three High School Musicals and while I’ll mock it along with friends, there is some definite, actual enjoyment on my part. The way I see it, fun is fun, even if it’s Disney fun.

Moreover, I genuinely think we all need to watch some bad sitcoms when we’re young. How many fun conversations have you had bemoaning the shows you used to watch–mocking Boy Meets World with friends or talking about how irritating Family Matters could be? These shows are social glue.

Which brings me to this–on that list of TV shows, two probably stood out. One was Avatar: The Last Airbender, a truly excellent cartoon that needs no defense. The other was The Wizards of Waverly Place.

I love The Wizards of Waverly Place and I think it’s the best show on the Disney Channel at the moment–which is certainly damning with faint, albeit well earned praise.

My former favorite Disney show, Phil of the Future, was enjoyable for a few reasons: a genuinely intriguing and decent actor as the star with a reasonably good supporting cast. A solidly ridiculous premise, which allows one to dismiss a lot of the more annoying crimes of kids shows. And finally, writers who clearly spent some time thinking about their characters motivations, the world they had built, and with a sense of enjoyment for mocking sillier sitcom plots, even while indulging in them.

Wizards of Waverly Place--a show about three wizard siblings who live in New York City and, uh, do magic–has all of that. The cast is all generally enjoyable, the plots aren’t as insipid as they could be, and the magic element allows dumber plot points to at least work within the show’s universe.

But the real selling point of the show is the two main cast members: David Henrie and Selena Gomez. David Henrie is straight from Disney’s “bland, affable boy” book, but he manages to make the character likable and gives him a certain depth.

Selena Gomez is just awesome to watch. She plays a totally rude, trouble-making piece of sass (or, you know, as sassy and trouble-making as Disney allows) and she does it with a ton of charm and good cheer. The actress may or may not be playing herself and she may or may not actually be able to become a real adult actress, but man, she is a treat to watch.

A small example, in several episodes where she has to sit in the background, she does bizarre things like comb her hair with a fork or pour sugar on her hands. Strange, but also very winning.

Obviously there are flaws with the show. Namely that it’s a tween show and will, of course, fall into the traps of that genre. But with writers who don’t mind doing a zombie-versus-students dance battle or making half an episode a Charlie Chaplin homage or doing an entire scene mocking “let’s rally the troops!” speeches are clearly doing something right.

I’m not going to suggest that you go out and watch the show, but next time you happen to be idly channel surfing, stop by Disney and give it a look. You might just have some crappy, non-adult fun.