SYNDICATED
An edited version of this essay was published as The Surprisingly Conservative Core of “Boy Meets World” on Episodes.
Boy Meets World is a show that I feel as if I was born with the knowledge of already implanted into a developing consciousness, fit for consuming and assuming the wholesome American values it championed. The series premiered in September of 1993, a year-and-a-half before I was born. Yet I can’t recall a time when I didn't know the name of the show or its main characters—protagonist Corey Matthews and his older brother, Eric, his girlfriend, Topanga Lawrence, his best friend Shawn Hunter, and next door neighbor and lifelong teacher, Mr. (George) Feeny.
In its seven year stint, the show went through multiple theme song changes. In season four’s opening sequence, Corey bounds down a flight of stairs of his house, out the door and joins Shawn,Topanga, and Eric in a red Chevy. An upbeat rock instrumental plays as the gang drives down a green screened road.
Clips of the show are reflected in the car’s mirrors and the blue sky. The clips serve not only as glimpses into the series but they appear alongside the cast members who smile wistfully as if they are daydreaming of the scenes themselves; their own true memories. Here are two boys enacting a routine handshake. Here is a little white girl, laughing and blonde. Here is a man holding his wife. Here is a teen boy gazing into the eyes of a teen girl. The memory-scenes tell us that this is a show about love; a show about friendship; about sons and daughters; husband and wife. In the twenty-one seconds that the theme song lasts, we’re shown that these teens are already imbued with a happy reminiscence. Together they drive, with the past propelling them onward to creating new memories and towards a new millennium, only a few seasons away.
By some regards, the Matthews are a traditional, middle-class, American family. The tradition being whiteness, heterosexual, a gendered binary. Middle class meaning they can afford for one parent to stay at home. American as in they prefer “Merry Christmas” over “Happy Holidays.” And presumably Christian despite the Jewish heritage of lead actor, Ben Savage. They reside in Philadelphia, a city I’ve never been to but doesn’t seem marked by the homogeneity displayed in Boy Meets World. Unlike comparable sitcoms of the time, Corey is not the youngest or oldest child but in the middle, between Eric and their younger sister, Morgan. From the beginning he is tasked with confronting his averageness. What makes Corey Matthew’s life special is that it is just like everyone else of the targeted audience. We watch as he amasses valuable lessons in everything from the bootstrap teachings about the importance of hard work to the virtues of abstinence.
Corey’s life is a stark contrast to his troubled foil and leather-jacket wearing heartthrob, Shawn. Shawn lives in a trailer park with his frequently unemployed father, Chet, and his mother, Verna. Verna is often the primary source of income for the family, a fact that eventually pushes her to leave, prompting Chet to follow, hoping to convince her to return. Consequently, their departures leave Shawn under the guardianship of a teacher for a season.
“I want to be normal, Chet. Normal,” Verna yells during a scene after both she and Chet have returned. She speaks with an affection that is supposed to indicate her lower-class status. Corey vocalizes discomfort with witnessing this intimacy of the Hunters. He is not from a family who has these sorts of fights, especially not in front of guests. Nor is the audience which is why it is funny. The familial dynamic of the Hunters depicts what Topanga later describes as one of the greatest challenges facing America: “The breakdown of the American family.”
Shawn responds, unprompted and injured, “Oh, you always gotta go after Shawn.”
“Well, I just think that lots of other issues like crime and the decline in education all have to do with how we’re brought up in our homes,” Topanga continues.
Later when Corey asks him if he was offended by the class discussion Shawn brushes it off, “What? That I’m personally responsible for the breakdown of American society? Nah, I got bigger problems.” The audience laughs on cue.
I’d be remiss to not make clear that Boy Meets World is a series that I love. I have vague memories of sitting in front of the T.V. with my older sister, watching ABC’s TGIF lineup. But it was after the show ended in 2000, that it became a lifelong staple via syndication. This experience was not unique to me; a phenomenon known even by the series itself and discussed by cast members during an Awesome Con panel in 2018. “When we were on the air we weren’t super popular. We were just kind of like the show that kept going,” said Will Friedle (Eric). “The second run of the show is really where I think the show kind of took off.”
I watched the second run and the third and fourth on Disney—which banned three episodes from airing for featuring underage drinking and discussing premarital sex—and ABCFamily. On both networks the show inched backward from evening time slots that could be watched after school and during dinner, to “I can catch it if I run home from the bus,” to times that could only be viewed on days where I didn’t have to go to school at all. During summer vacation, I’d take breaks from sitting with my friends on the electrical green box in our neighborhood, in order to go home to catch the two episodes of the day. The sometimes slapstick and absurdist humor appeals to me now as much as it did in my childhood.
“Boy Meets World, by the fourth or fifth season, we just started to get more and more meta,” Rider Strong (Shawn Hunter) said during a 2013 reunion panel with the rest of the cast and co-creator, Micahel Jacob. Strong has reflected on the surreality and self-referential qualities that grew throughout the series during several panels at fan conventions. “Our show was weird. You know? Our show did weird things,” he said at Mega Con in 2019. “That’s turned out to be the lasting value of the show, I think, ‘cause that it took all those weird risks. It has all these tonal shifts.”
The shifts were not just season to season or one week’s airing to the next. With the flare of a soap opera, the shifts could occur within a single episode. A few jokes about a character not passing a class could lead to said character joining a youth cult, and end with him finding faith in God after a trusted teacher’s brush with death.
Though the self-aware humor never quite teetered into self-critique, it still foregrounded my suspicion and fascination with the (often white) upper middle class suburbia I was surrounded by in Ohio. Boy Meets World mirrored the strangeness sometimes felt when I visited the two-parent homes of certain friends. Multi-story houses with finished basements featuring complete bars for the parents to seek refuge. Uniformed squares of grass with a single small tree, indicating the youth of the neighborhood. Cabinets full of food spilled into walk-in snack pantries. Smiles and laughter after a mother gripes about how her husband could not survive without her. Holiday parties where guests show pictures of the new family puppy and discuss the joys of puppy breath. An absence of fences or gates, giving an illusion of openness or, a confidence in invisible barriers. Repression. Pity for the less fortunate. Welcoming of the girl with good manners whose family is one of lack.
Such as with the fun in watching Boy Meets World, my forays into upper middle class homes were often exhilarating. I could almost camouflage. I could love and be loved by them. Yet I also knew the truth to be found in the life of the Hunter family that the writers presented as farcical. The trailer park was normal, as were single parenting, unemployment, and tiring oneself to provide and still not having enough. There was love to be found too, in this version of normal. I did not envy the upper middle class—at least, not all the time—because I knew how to live in their world but I doubted they could do the same in mine.
I observed, taking note of how much of their lives were predicated on safety and falsity. As I grew into adolescence I thought movies like American Beauty showcased the silly hypocrisy and fixations of suburbia. In the albums of Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire, I commiserated with lyrics that spoke to the smothering hollowness that towns could produce. “Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small,” Régine Chassagne sang on “Sprawl II,” “that we can never get away from the sprawl.”
In a departure from season four’s opening credits, season five opens with the young cast members hanging out in a metropolitan area though it’s also clear that they’re on a set. A new theme song plays as we watch them have a good old time. “When this boy meets world, boy meets world. Wandering down this road that we call life is what we’re doing. It’s good to know I have friends who will always stand by me.” They buy hot dogs and pretzels from a cart. As Corey and Topanga (or Ben Savage and Daniel Fischel) kiss on a sidewalk, a bucket of water is poured on them by their laughing cast mates, standing above on a fire escape. Some of the actors look straight into the camera, smiling or making silly faces. It’s impossible to tell if they’re all in character or if they’re simply just coworkers spending time together.
It’s season five that it becomes clear that this is a show keen to its own straddling of reality. In its second episode “Boy Meets Real World,” in which Corey documents Shawn’s struggle to connect with a formerly estranged rich-half brother, Jack, he defends himself against the charge that he’s ripping off the Mtv franchise. “I have no knowledge of this Real World of which you speak. My Real World is the real Real World.” It’s a joke of course, depicting a student rushing to protect himself against the penalties of copying someone else’s work.
Is it also a wink to the meta tendencies Rider Strong referenced? Or a wishful fantasy in which Boy Meets World represents the true reality and MTV’s morally ambiguous and depravity show exists only as a punchline?
The accusation of plagiarism is leveled by Angela Moore, played by Trina McGee, the only recurring black character to last more than a season and maybe the earliest reason for my continued loyalty to the show. Her primary role was Shawn’s first (and only) long term girlfriend, a milestone we watch him struggle to achieve. Though never short of admirers, maintaining an interest in a girl more than an episode or two was unheard of for him. We come to understand that issues stemming from his parents, along with his romanticization of Corey and Topanga’s relationship, prevent him from attaining his ideal love.
Corey and Topanga officially begin dating in season three but their narrative is rewritten at different points as a relationship that begins at the ages of four and two. In the seventh and final season they marry. The couple is enveloped in a fairytale-esque arch that tells us they are meant to be together forever. It’s the sort of childhood sweethearts story many are taught to yearn for, though I’ve seldom seen it brought to fruition.
“I want what you have,” Shawn repeats at different points to Cory. Disillusioned by his parents' separation, Corey and Topanga are a stand-in for the aspirations children often learn from watching the marriage or relationships of their own guardians. But with Angela, Shawn obtains a relationship that, at times, is more reflective of my own life experiences and that of friends, than the one he covets. They begin with an intensity—momentarily threatened by Shawn’s kidnapping at the hands of girls he’s ghosted in the past. Shawn, a proto soft boy, later breaks up with Angela because he wants to meet new people. Their story morphs into a will-they-won’t-they scenario. They grow apart, figuring out what it is they both need and want as their lives continue to intersect and overlap until they are ready to settle back into each other.
Race is rarely addressed on Boy Meets World and never within the context of Shawn and Angela’s relationship. McGee’s own feelings about the depiction interracial couple may have contributed to this in some part. During the airing of the show, she wrote an op ed for the LA Times in which she argued that the “colorblind” love shown on television had the potential to help usher in a more racially harmonious future (McGee has since said she was pressured to write the essay.)
Despite the proto-post-racial narrative, Angela is not simply a white written character being acted by a black woman, but a black girl character. The charm McGee brought to Angela was a welcomed presence. She was not a moral compass of the show or a cautionary tale. As a child, I was mindful of the way her hair changed episode to episode without comment or wandering white hands begging to touch it. Her character was not a caricature of black femininity but portrayed the confidence and humor I saw in my sister, my cousins and myself. Once, she remarks to Corey that they were never really friends and turns away from him, leaving him stunned. The scene may have intended to evoke surprise or even sadness but I always laughed at the flippancy of her delivery, a tone that also said, “Boy, get out of my face.”
Shawn and Angela didn’t receive the same happily ever after as Corey and Topanga, in fact, McGee is the only cast regular who doesn’t appear in the series finale. It’s a decision Miachel Jacobs stands by, claiming that to keep them together would have been dishonest. “Forget the color. They never meshed. Every episode was about why Shawn and Angela would not sustain,” he said in 2018. “There can only be one Cory and Topanga and if Cory and Topanga and Shawn and Angela succeed, it lessens what I always thought was the mantra of the core show.”
My first reaction was to question how the creator of a show could be so unaware of what he presented on screen. “Never meshed?” The resolve that Shawn and Angela weren’t destined for each other wasn’t unbelievable but their union wouldn’t have been any less realistic than Corey and Topanga’s. My second reaction was to scoff because, like of course, the poor kid and the black girl could never represent the core mantra in a world that spent so much time on aspirational whiteness.
Perhaps this assessment was overthought and I was exhibiting the exact overzealous fan pressure Jacobs was rebuking. But his comments echoed in my mind when in January, McGee tweeted about the racism she endured while filming Boy Meets World as well as during her guest spot in the Disney spinoff, Girl Meets World in 2015. In replies to upset fans McGee clarified, “not Rider,” a statement that calmed me more than I’d like to admit.
In an interview with Yahoo, McGee further explained the incidents and why she decided to speak about it. “I couldn't seem to shake the hurt of some words and situations that were said not only on that set but on most of the sets that I’ve worked on.” Though she said she had reconciled with most of her former castmates who apologized, she admitted that their mistreatment plagued her for years. “The representation has to come deeper from under and behind the scenes more and more. Just because you see a couple of people that they’re putting out front that is not the case in the overall colorism of Hollywood,” McGee said.
In Jacob’s 2018 comments he stated, “It was one of the early interracial relationships on television where we never mentioned that aspect of it. We just never thought anything of that.” If they weren’t thinking of “that” in the writer’s room, in the world they created, in the messaging they sought to deliver, why would they have thought about it elsewhere? I should not have been surprised by McGee’s stories but I was hoodwinked by my nostalgia.
If it could be argued that Boy Meets World succeeded in creating a colorblind story of love they had failed to deliver on its promise of blanket equality where it mattered most: in the treatment of the black person occupying the role. Even the hair changes I loved so much were marred as McGee revealed that she’d spend entire nights before a day of shooting, doing her hair because there wasn’t a stylist onset who could.
The ability to critique, poke fun and pull at the seams of older sitcoms stems from the time in which they were created. “Michael Jacobs was coming from this world where you could just cast a new character because, like, television was just airing once maybe a rerun and then no one would ever see it again,” Strong said at ECCC SyFy Wire in 2019. He goes on to explain that Jacobs was “game to play with” the inconsistencies that built up throughout.
Since the period of Boy Meets World’s first airing, television has fashioned itself for syndication and replay.On Netflix and Hulu, entire series are released with the awareness they may be watched in one’s day worth of indulging. Even shows that still air weekly on cable or broadcast networks are created with the foresight that they too will eventually become a tab on a streaming site. The tolerance audiences once had for inexplicable plot holes and oversights have waned as the trend of watching large portions of story arcs at once has grown. There are, of course, exceptions. Most notably with the CW’s Riverdale, a show that seems to revel in the abandonment of its own plotlines mid-season.
The unlimited reach of the internet has also reframed audience viewership. When Jacobs convinced ABC to conduct an online poll with viewers to determine whether or not Topanga and Cory should marry by the series’ end, the concept of social media was still novel. The industry of film and television was more opaque then, unlike now when a viral post about an actor can lead to headlining an article in Vanity Fair. Artificial Intelligence has its hands in both writing and production, tracking the interests of potential viewers.
Streaming Site Originals often have the air of being developed in relation to Twitter discourse, trepidly covering the most basic tenants of representation and liberal politics, all the while delivering stories as flat and uninspired as the debates they seek to mimic. The Algorithm, (the Internet’s answer for a better defined Big Brother entity that names the collective awareness of being manipulated by corporations) can curate a list tailored to one’s taste while still managing to instill the same supremacy of past traditional broadcasting. In short, you may have to search harder for titles that don’t align with the identity that The Algorithm has determined for you.
There is something to romanticize about the era in which maybe I was more at the behest of a television network but also well versed and content with the formulas of sitcoms, ones that weren’t based on already exhausted internet discussions and clickbait. But maybe there is often something to romanticize about any time that has passed us on with no chance of retrieval. I’ve considered how an earlier prominence of social media could have affected McGee’s (as well other black performers) choice to remain silent for many years. If people felt that when they spoke there could be a coalition of support even if it wasn't coming from within her industry, what else would we have known sooner?
“I said it way before I knew any of the world’s changes were about to happen,” McGee said about her decision to tweet, in her Yahoo interview in July. “I do believe in divine timing,” This was weeks after riots and protests began across the United States, against the violence and murders committed by police officers. America’s Racial Reckoning headlined the pages of NBC, NPR, CNN, and The Washington Post in admission that we were as far as ever from a post-racial utopia or the colorblindness depicted on 90s sitcoms. In a country founded on generations of genocide andone that forever bound a people to the category nonhuman, we are always on the cusp of the beginning and an end. Centuries of resilient struggle against, survival in spite of, joy found away from, prove that we have always been in the thick of a racial reckoning.
Perhaps for some, it wasn’t until an election of 2016 that the United States jumped the shark. By selecting a literal television personality as its government head, the surreal became hyperreal in the most sickening of ways. Or maybe it wasn’t until this past summer in 2020, when footage of an officer murdering a person went viral though I do wonder how they missed the videos of 2016 and 2014, the phone call in 2012, the newsreel of ‘91. Just as times became unprecedented we remembered that some narratives are mainstays.
Against a new setting of a pandemic that killed 200,000 (to the shrugs of government officials) and unemployment rates that rivaled the Great Depression, thousands of people blocked intersections, congested traffic, tagged banks, lit fires and broke the windows of luxury brand stores. Tired claims about the virtues of peace resounded and Vicky’s Osterweil’s “In Defense of Looting” recirculated. On my timeline the commentary oscillated between the “world is burning!!!!” and jokes about watching the season finale of America. I’d like to think some of us were never fully tuned in and were instead waiting for audiences to join us in a quest for witnessing something worth rooting for.