When I was a kid, Friday nights were reserved for ABC’s TGIF lineup. Boy Meets World was one of my favorite shows growing up. I grew up watching that show. Ben Savage is Cory Matthews, the Boy who meets the World for seven seasons, taking him from middle school to high school to college. The first couple of seasons were grounded in reality and it was a family show. Then something happened and the show became self-referential and a parody of itself. And it was awesome.
Cory Matthews is a regular kid growing up in Philadelphia. He lives with his parents Alan and Amy (William Russ and Betsy Randle), his older brother Eric (Will Friedle), and his younger sister Morgan (played by Lily Nicksay and later Lindsay Ridgeway). He spends his days hanging out with his best friend Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong) and later on with his girlfriend Topanga (Danielle Fishel). He lives next door to his perpetual teacher, Mr. Feeny (William Daniels).
At first Cory deal with issues like falling asleep in class and failing a test, thinking his mom is having an affair before realizing it’s a misunderstanding, and dealing with an embarrassing haircut. In later seasons the storylines become absurd: Eric goes to Hollywood and joins the cast of Kid gets Acquainted with Universe for an episode, Cory becomes a WWII soldier who gets amnesia, Shawn gets into college.
This really isn’t a good show. If I didn’t grow up watching it, I probably wouldn’t like it. But I did grow up watching it, and so if I’m channel surfing and catch it, I have to watch it. It’s a curse.
The show has a hazy sense of continuity. Topanga had an older sister that disappeared and she became an only child. Shawn had an older sister and a half-brother that both disappeared, but that’s cool because later he got another half-brother (Matthew Lawrence) who became a cast member. Cory’s sister disappeared for a season and came back as a different actress. Mr. Turner (Anthony Tyler Quinn) was a big character for a while, and then he got in a motorcycle accident and never showed up on camera again. Minkus (Lee Norris) was the stereotypical nerd and he also vanished for a few seasons before he popped up when they graduated from high school.
When you’re watching the show season by season you can see that it gets really bizarre. My guess is that they replaced the writers with people who had never seen the show. They just made up backstories and histories to spice up episodes, and never bothered to see if it conflicted with continuity.
The show was on from September 24, 1993 until May 5, 2000. This show was the 90’s. You get to see Cory and Shawn grow up, both physically and emotionally. They had to revamp the show a few times, and it jumped the shark quite a few times. But people love to watch a train wreck, so they kept coming back each week, for seven seasons. You can’t deny that it’s a cult classic. It’s no Saved by the Bell, but it’s still a staple of my generation’s childhood.
Critically Rated at 12/17
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