Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot Boy Meets World reruns. It’s on in the mornings in that time I’m preparing for the day and eating breakfast, and those few minutes before I leave for work. It was a show I enjoyed a lot while growing up, when it occupied the 9:00 p.m. slot of TGIF, and it’s admittedly a trip down memory lane, watching it on most weekday mornings.
But watching it through my old-as-shit grownup eyes now, it’s so obvious of what the dynamic of the show really was. It was never so much of the life and development of the main character, Cory Matthews through his own actions, as much as it was Cory and everyone else learning, living and understanding life by means of best friend Shawn Hunter’s constant fuckups. Pretty much all of the adversity of the Cory character stems from girls and school. All other conflicts throughout the series are funneled through Shawn’s character, and it’s up to Cory, his family and Mr. Feeny to guide him through all these life’s roadblocks, and where they can all learn and grown through his parade of failure.
It’s easy to miss this pattern when one, you’re a kid, and two, you’re limited to an episode a week, but through the luxury of being old, and literally tuning in at the tail-end of every episode where the resolution, often involving Shawn being smacked into reality and everyone learning in the process, happens, and the predictable setup of the following episode makes for easy understanding of it.
This morning was the episode where Shawn got involved with a cult LOL, and where not just Cory, but Cory’s parents and Mr. Feeny all interjected themselves into the fray, and it turned into a tense, emotional standoff between the grown-ups and the cult leader, while Cory and Topanga cornered Shawn into a hospital room where “the cool teacher” and Shawn’s current surrogate father, Mr. Turner was in a full body cast, freshly admitted after a motorcycle accident, and barraged him with some moral-beating diatribe, prompting him to see the error in his ways and seek faith. But the bottom line is that Shawn almost joined a cult, among all of the other fuckups in his character’s life that he was subject to. I mean really, who the fuck is as weak-willed and minded to fall for a cult? Do cults even exist today?
But it really got me thinking about the Shawn character, and about how he’s pretty much the sole reason the show managed to stay on as long as it did. Without Shawn Hunter, there pretty much is no reason for any substantial storylines to exist in Boy Meets World. Here’s Cory Matthews’ drama history:
- Got bad grades
- Got dumped by Topanga
- Had a hard time adjusting to high school
- Got dumped by Topanga
- Confused about what college to go to
- Got dumped by Topanga
- Got married to Topanga
- Show ended
In between getting dumped by Topanga, the whole show revolved around Cory and the Matthews family plus Mr. Feeny dealing with, and solving all of Shawn’s problems. Every single “very special episode/story” revolved around Shawn Hunter and his fucked up life. Which include the following arcs/concepts:
- Lived in a trailer park
- More poverty and the risk of losing Christmas when his parents got laid off
- Racism, when Cory calls him a WOP for not paying attention in class
- Parents get divorced
- Mom abandons Shawn and his dad by taking their entire mobile home with her
- Dad abandons Shawn to go finding Mom
- Shawn moves in with his teacher, because his slovenly life style cramps the Matthews family
- Gets caught up in the wrong crowd at least four times in the series
- Puts the ho before the bro, when he has one of many fallouts with Cory involving the chick who played the Terminatrix
- Gets involved with mobsters
- JOINED A CULT
- Discovers he has a half-brother
- Series’ only substantial relationship is an interracial one with a black girlfriend who dumps him and gets back with him at the same rate as Cory and Topanga
- Dad comes back, only to reveal that Mom’s not really his mom, and that his real mom is actually a stripper, confirming that Shawn is in fact, a bastard child.
- Dad dies
- Refuses to be Cory’s best man because he’s jealous that blood relation takes precedence
- Girlfriend moves to Europe, does not live happily ever after like Cory and Topanga
- Series ends
So with that extensive list in mind, it basically proves that without Shawn, Boy Meets World is pretty much a one season and done kind of show. Looking back at Boy Meets World, and its ABC TGIF sitcom brethren, it’s hard to imagine that any other show had anyone with as many issues as Shawn Hunter did. Frankly, so many of them had so many characters, that it was hard to spread the spotlight to any one particular character to have so much shit happen to them. Between Family Matters, Full House, Step by Step and Perfect Strangers, none of them had any sort of an enigmatic, troubled character like Shawn Hunter. The closest thing I can think of is actually Robbie from Dinosaurs, because when it wasn’t Earl fucking up at his job, it was Robbie always hanging out with the wrong crowd, or getting involved with the prehistoric plants that were supposed to be a metaphor for drugs. But still, comparatively, not even close to as a fuckup as Shawn Hunter was.
What’s even sadder is that despite shouldering the load for Boy Meets World all those years, the actor behind Shawn, Rider Strong, hasn’t accomplished shit otherwise in his career. Seriously, what’s the last thing he’s ever done? Cabin Fever? I mean, nobody from that show ultimately really did anything beyond the show except for maybe the older brother doing some voice-over work, or even Topanga, getting some fifteen minutes of fame back when she got fat and then lost the weight to become super hot for a few minutes being a NutriSystem spokesperson.
Perhaps Rider Strong isn’t as far distanced from his fictional counterpart all those years. But for what it’s worth, Boy Meets World is pretty much nothing without him.
