The Odd Longevity of “Boy Meets World”

You can never tell which pieces of pop culture are going to last and which just going to fade away. I’m at that age where I’m starting to see the twenty-somethings a few years younger than me getting nostalgic for media that I was aware of when I was younger, but too old to have much interest in, like the "Power Rangers" and "Pokemon." And then there’s the inexplicable fuss over the 90s ABC sitcom "Boy Meets World."

Everyone I knew as a kid watched ABC’s Friday night block of family shows, home to "Full House," "Family Matters," and "Step by Step." "Boy Meets World," chronicling the growing pains of a boy named Cory Matthews (Ben Savage), premiered in 1993 and ran for seven seasons until the TGIF block went kaput. I remember liking the first season when Cory was in junior high. The years with Cory in high school got sillier and more pandering to younger audiences. Finally, the last two seasons with Cory in college got so ridiculous, that I stopped watching with any regularity. I hold "Boy Meets World" in about as much esteem as I hold "Full House" and "Family Matters," which is to say that I’m not embarrassed to have watched them when I was a kid, but I remember them frequently being terrible enough that I’m sure they’d be unbearable to sit through now as an adult.

"Boy Meets World" sticks in my mind because I remember being fascinated with how it deteriorated over the years. There was a major format change between the first and second seasons that eliminated major cast members and made the show less about the Matthews family and more kid-centric, focusing on Cory and his best friend Shawn (Rider Strong). Further cast changes were frequent, adding and subtracting siblings, teachers, friends, bullies, and love interests. The regular characters’ personalities also changed drastically. Cory started out as a mischievous kid and ended up as an insufferable goody two-shoes. His older brother Eric (Will Friedle) seemed to lose IQ points with every subsequent season, until he was a complete dolt who was only around for comic relief in the last season. Shawn went from being slightly rougher-edged than Cory to someone with an unstable home life from the wrong side of the tracks, though there was some backpedaling later on.

So I found it very strange that younger viewers currently in their teens and early twenties consider "Boy Meets World" a childhood favorite, even though they should have only been around for the tail end of its original run. And they love it enough that Disney recently announced that they were in the early stages of developing a new spinoff/sequel series, tentatively titled "Girl Meets World," to follow the adventures of Cory’s preteen daughter. Ben Savage and Danielle Fishel, who played Cory’s girlfriend-turned-fiancee-turned-spouse Topanga, are being courted to return to their old roles. The last I heard of "Boy Meets World," the show was in a ratings decline after the TGIF block went through some serious pruning in 1997. I wasn’t alone in not liking the college episodes, and I was pretty sure that after the last episode where Cory and Topanga tied the knot, that would be the last I’d ever see of them.

But I had forgotten about cable. Once "Boy Meets World" finished its first run on ABC, the off-network syndication of the earlier seasons on terrestrial networks stopped at about the same time. However, the first six seasons were picked up to run on the Disney Channel from 2000 until 2007, also popping up on ABC Family, where the reruns are still airing in an early morning timeslot. "Boy Meets World" is one of the only TGIF shows that Disney and ABC own outright, and it fit both the Disney Channel and ABC Family audiences, so they kept it on the schedule. Thus, "Boy Meets World" ended up outlasting just about all of its sitcom contemporaries like "Sabrina the Teenaged Witch." More importantly, it managed to attract an entirely new generation of kid viewers, long after its original run had finished.

I always wondered how some mediocre shows like "Gilligan’s Island" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" always stuck around in reruns for so long while so many of the better ones never made it through more than a year or two in syndication. Looks like who’s holding the rights and what they choose to do with them has a lot of impact on where your favorite shows ultimately end up in reruns and for what duration. And the audience matters. Even though I don’t think much of "Boy Meets World," it makes sense as something that Disney viewers would latch on to, and the potential spinoff would fit right into the ABC Family lineup of slightly retro family sitcoms.
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