I am open to all future Boy Meets World related interviews
I was quoted as the Fannish Expert in the Canadian magazine Maclean's in TV reviewer Jaime Weinman's article about Girl Meets World, the upcoming Boy Meets World sequel, thanks to my Inconsistently Detailed Boy Meets World Episode Guide. While I was quoted pretty heavily for a short article (I knew mentioning Degrassi would do it), my narcissism compels me to post the full text of the interview, in which I waxed ludicrously verbose, as I am wont to do anytime the name "Rider Strong" is invoked. (I was disappointed to learn from the article that Strong is not slated to appear in GMW, a fact I optimistically didn't bother to research before the interview.)
Interview full text:
When did you start doing BOY MEETS WORLD reviews, and why? I started doing Boy Meets World episode reviews in the summer of 2003. I was home from my freshman year of college and the reruns were playing on the Disney channel. At first I was just writing up little capsule reviews, thinking I might write an article for my comedy website about how I'd rediscovered the show and it was surprisingly good. Before I knew it, I'd reached a level of massive obsession. I'd tape the episodes on VHS, and then go back to review particular moments or to catch lines of dialogue I wanted to capture word-for-word. I ended up writing lengthy articles about most of the episodes and putting it all together in a database, for which I learned database programming.
I vaguely remember watching some of the episodes during their original run. I was eight when the show debuted in 1993, and my friends and I would stay up late at sleepovers to watch TGIF. I don't remember thinking the show was a standout at the time. In the reruns, I saw an edge of surreal comedy that I didn't remember from my childhood viewings. The jokes felt fresh and new, but the characters were like old friends, and the show, in rerun form, was infused with a warm comfortable nostalgia that was appealing to me at that moment in time, between childhood and adulthood.
What's your evaluation of the quality of the show - a good show, an uneven show, a guilty pleasure? Do you think there's anything specific to the writing or performance of the show that made it stand out from its TGIF brethren? The show is distinctly uneven in quality. One of my goals in collating my review data was to try to pinpoint if the massive variation in quality could be attributed to particular seasons or writers, and it really couldn't. One of my favorite seasons is season 5, which contains some of the best material in the series, including a self-aware horror movie spoof and a meta-episode in which the actors play caricatures of themselves, all against the backdrop of a season arc dealing with the emotional fallout of graduation. It also contains its fair share of stinkers, including an alarmingly sexist "girls vs. boys" fight and an out-of-nowhere Very Special Episode about the dangers of alcohol abuse.
A really great episode of "Boy Meets World" is genuinely funny, often with a bizarre, surreal sense of humor, yet has a solid emotional core and allows characters' established personalities and relationships to drive the story. Bad episodes force the characters to act like cardboard stock characters in the service of some tired sitcom cliche. When you tune in, you have no idea what to expect. It could just as easily be great as awful. Unpredictable rewards are part of the joy--when the show is genuinely funny or resonant, it's surprisingly funny, surprisingly resonant. I've never been moved to obsessively document a show that's just good all the time, like "Mad Men," because its quality is expected. Watching "Boy Meets World' is like panning for gold. Sometimes it's just dust, but sometimes you do strike it rich!
It's worth noting that most of the unevenness seems to be due to the writing. The actors seemed to be a consistently solid bunch and generally rose to the level of the writing. Good writing played to actors' strengths (Ben Savage delivers killer neurotic rants; Will Friedle has brilliant comedic timing; Rider Strong does a great vulnerable lip quiver.) I think the show was largely room-written, though, so I wasn't able to identify any consistency based on the credited writers.
Related to the last question, why do you think this particular show - never a huge hit, just a moderate success - has become such an icon among '90s kids? What is it about this show that makes it so much more memorable than all the other shows where people learned lessons and had comedic adventures with hints of drama? Often, when you love something as a child and then experience it again as an adult, it's not nearly as cool as you remembered. "Goosebumps" books are not great literature. Atreyu from "Neverending Story" is just a scrawny kid and not a dreamy heartthrob. Rediscovering "Boy Meets World," for me, was the opposite experience. I liked it okay as a kid, but when I came back to it in my early 20s, I was not only reunited with familiar characters, but I was surprised to discover a goofy sense of humor that totally jibed with my own.
The show was written to appeal to both children and adults, and it's possible the adult-oriented humor went over my head the first time around. But I also think that in its best moments, "Boy Meets World" was on the forefront of a particular style of humor that, perhaps, the sitcom world wasn't yet ready for. While mostly grounded in realism--or at least what passes for realism in TV land--"Boy Meets World" had surprising moments of self-aware meta-humor and anything-can-happen weirdness. Eric joins the cast of the gentle family sitcom "Kid Gets Acquainted with the Universe." Shawn spends an entire episode looking disturbingly hot in drag, "to prove a point or something," as he later recalls vaguely. Boring Cory has a huge poster of celery. Shawn gets a pet pig.
Later sitcoms like "Scrubs" and "30 Rock" would deliver wacky, surreal antics more consistently and, perhaps, more intentionally. My theory is that "Boy Meets World" didn't set out to be a forerunner of a new sitcom style, but as the show went on, the creative team got a little loopy. Despite its reputation as a solidly middle-of-the-pack sitcom, "Boy Meets World" deserves a lot of credit for its willingness to experiment.
Do you think the idea of "Girl Meets World" will appeal to "Boy Meets World" fans (who may now have kids of their own to watch it with)? Or are they not going to accept it if it doesn't have more of the original cast around? I have high hopes for "Girl Meets World," especially in the wake of successful reboots like "Degrassi: The Next Generation" and "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." "Degrassi" featured some of the previous-generation cast members as parents or teachers of the new generation, but they wisely used them sparingly, instead allowing the new kids plenty of room to come into their own. "Girl Meets World" will have to do the same. "My Little Pony" is an object lesson in how to do 90s nostalgia right. They kept the basic appeal of the original (cute ponies), but grounded the show in comforting, pleasant relationships; character-driven storylines; and offbeat comedy that appeals to all ages.
Like "Degrassi" and "My Little Pony," "Girl Meets World" will succeed or fail on its writing. The original cast members are nice (and will certainly appeal to the nostalgic side of us 90's kids), but the connection to the old series will only give the show a head start, not lasting appeal. We'll come for Rider Strong, but we'll stay if and only if the show makes us laugh and we care about the new characters.
"Girl Meets World" will please us if it understands why we love "Boy Meets World." It's so easy to get wrong, and many episodes of "Boy Meets World" didn't understand it at all. We don't especially care about gentle family humor, or life lessons, or the usual sitcom antics, although we're happy to have that familiar backdrop. We want a
show that comforts us with the familiar, then pushes the comedy envelope. We want a show that respects its characters and writes them with consistency, humor, and heart. We want a show that recognizes that we're smart and a little strange. We want a show that's not afraid to get weird.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.
Interview full text:
When did you start doing BOY MEETS WORLD reviews, and why? I started doing Boy Meets World episode reviews in the summer of 2003. I was home from my freshman year of college and the reruns were playing on the Disney channel. At first I was just writing up little capsule reviews, thinking I might write an article for my comedy website about how I'd rediscovered the show and it was surprisingly good. Before I knew it, I'd reached a level of massive obsession. I'd tape the episodes on VHS, and then go back to review particular moments or to catch lines of dialogue I wanted to capture word-for-word. I ended up writing lengthy articles about most of the episodes and putting it all together in a database, for which I learned database programming.
I vaguely remember watching some of the episodes during their original run. I was eight when the show debuted in 1993, and my friends and I would stay up late at sleepovers to watch TGIF. I don't remember thinking the show was a standout at the time. In the reruns, I saw an edge of surreal comedy that I didn't remember from my childhood viewings. The jokes felt fresh and new, but the characters were like old friends, and the show, in rerun form, was infused with a warm comfortable nostalgia that was appealing to me at that moment in time, between childhood and adulthood.
What's your evaluation of the quality of the show - a good show, an uneven show, a guilty pleasure? Do you think there's anything specific to the writing or performance of the show that made it stand out from its TGIF brethren? The show is distinctly uneven in quality. One of my goals in collating my review data was to try to pinpoint if the massive variation in quality could be attributed to particular seasons or writers, and it really couldn't. One of my favorite seasons is season 5, which contains some of the best material in the series, including a self-aware horror movie spoof and a meta-episode in which the actors play caricatures of themselves, all against the backdrop of a season arc dealing with the emotional fallout of graduation. It also contains its fair share of stinkers, including an alarmingly sexist "girls vs. boys" fight and an out-of-nowhere Very Special Episode about the dangers of alcohol abuse.
A really great episode of "Boy Meets World" is genuinely funny, often with a bizarre, surreal sense of humor, yet has a solid emotional core and allows characters' established personalities and relationships to drive the story. Bad episodes force the characters to act like cardboard stock characters in the service of some tired sitcom cliche. When you tune in, you have no idea what to expect. It could just as easily be great as awful. Unpredictable rewards are part of the joy--when the show is genuinely funny or resonant, it's surprisingly funny, surprisingly resonant. I've never been moved to obsessively document a show that's just good all the time, like "Mad Men," because its quality is expected. Watching "Boy Meets World' is like panning for gold. Sometimes it's just dust, but sometimes you do strike it rich!
It's worth noting that most of the unevenness seems to be due to the writing. The actors seemed to be a consistently solid bunch and generally rose to the level of the writing. Good writing played to actors' strengths (Ben Savage delivers killer neurotic rants; Will Friedle has brilliant comedic timing; Rider Strong does a great vulnerable lip quiver.) I think the show was largely room-written, though, so I wasn't able to identify any consistency based on the credited writers.
Related to the last question, why do you think this particular show - never a huge hit, just a moderate success - has become such an icon among '90s kids? What is it about this show that makes it so much more memorable than all the other shows where people learned lessons and had comedic adventures with hints of drama? Often, when you love something as a child and then experience it again as an adult, it's not nearly as cool as you remembered. "Goosebumps" books are not great literature. Atreyu from "Neverending Story" is just a scrawny kid and not a dreamy heartthrob. Rediscovering "Boy Meets World," for me, was the opposite experience. I liked it okay as a kid, but when I came back to it in my early 20s, I was not only reunited with familiar characters, but I was surprised to discover a goofy sense of humor that totally jibed with my own.
The show was written to appeal to both children and adults, and it's possible the adult-oriented humor went over my head the first time around. But I also think that in its best moments, "Boy Meets World" was on the forefront of a particular style of humor that, perhaps, the sitcom world wasn't yet ready for. While mostly grounded in realism--or at least what passes for realism in TV land--"Boy Meets World" had surprising moments of self-aware meta-humor and anything-can-happen weirdness. Eric joins the cast of the gentle family sitcom "Kid Gets Acquainted with the Universe." Shawn spends an entire episode looking disturbingly hot in drag, "to prove a point or something," as he later recalls vaguely. Boring Cory has a huge poster of celery. Shawn gets a pet pig.
Later sitcoms like "Scrubs" and "30 Rock" would deliver wacky, surreal antics more consistently and, perhaps, more intentionally. My theory is that "Boy Meets World" didn't set out to be a forerunner of a new sitcom style, but as the show went on, the creative team got a little loopy. Despite its reputation as a solidly middle-of-the-pack sitcom, "Boy Meets World" deserves a lot of credit for its willingness to experiment.
Do you think the idea of "Girl Meets World" will appeal to "Boy Meets World" fans (who may now have kids of their own to watch it with)? Or are they not going to accept it if it doesn't have more of the original cast around? I have high hopes for "Girl Meets World," especially in the wake of successful reboots like "Degrassi: The Next Generation" and "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." "Degrassi" featured some of the previous-generation cast members as parents or teachers of the new generation, but they wisely used them sparingly, instead allowing the new kids plenty of room to come into their own. "Girl Meets World" will have to do the same. "My Little Pony" is an object lesson in how to do 90s nostalgia right. They kept the basic appeal of the original (cute ponies), but grounded the show in comforting, pleasant relationships; character-driven storylines; and offbeat comedy that appeals to all ages.
Like "Degrassi" and "My Little Pony," "Girl Meets World" will succeed or fail on its writing. The original cast members are nice (and will certainly appeal to the nostalgic side of us 90's kids), but the connection to the old series will only give the show a head start, not lasting appeal. We'll come for Rider Strong, but we'll stay if and only if the show makes us laugh and we care about the new characters.
"Girl Meets World" will please us if it understands why we love "Boy Meets World." It's so easy to get wrong, and many episodes of "Boy Meets World" didn't understand it at all. We don't especially care about gentle family humor, or life lessons, or the usual sitcom antics, although we're happy to have that familiar backdrop. We want a
show that comforts us with the familiar, then pushes the comedy envelope. We want a show that respects its characters and writes them with consistency, humor, and heart. We want a show that recognizes that we're smart and a little strange. We want a show that's not afraid to get weird.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.