Danielle Fishel had a pretty specific idea of what Girl Meets World was supposed to be. What she got, she says, was something much more tied to Boy Meets World than she expected.
Fishel, who returned as Topanga Lawrence for the Disney Channel sequel, recently revisited the experience on Pod Meets World, the podcast she hosts with her former co-stars Will Friedle and Rider Strong. Looking back, she said she was frustrated by how quickly the new series began leaning on the sitcom that came before it.
“I remember being really frustrated after the first season started,” she said, opining that Michael Jacobs, the executive producer who created both shows, made Girl Meets World too similar to Boy Meets World. “Before the show came out, Michael [and I] had a whole conversation about the idea that this was not going to be a reboot. It was going to be a whole new show.”
That distinction was important to Fishel. She said Jacobs had even asked her to help communicate to fans that the sequel wasn’t simply going to recreate the original series.
Fishel said that Jacobs encouraged her to do “a whole blog about how this show was going to be its own thing,” which she did. “[I wrote] that there were going to be people who were coming from Boy Meets World who were going to be looking for things about this show to make them feel like it’s Boy Meets World,” she said. “And you might get a few of those Easter eggs, but it is not Boy Meets World and you have to give it that grace.”
Once production began, though, Fishel said that approach didn’t quite play out the way she had anticipated.
“We got in there, and every day from morning until night was Michael and the writers trying to shoehorn Boy Meets World things into it,” she said.
Strong, who played Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World and later appeared in seven episodes of Girl Meets World, said he experienced something similar when he returned to the characters and world of the original series.
“That’s what I felt … when I showed up to act,” he said. “I didn’t remember any of these things that they were making me do [from Boy Meets World]…when I showed up for that first scene and they’re like, ‘Remember when you and Ben [Savage] did this?’ And I’d be like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Like ‘You’re sleeping, do the snoring thing!’ And I remember just being like, ‘Do we have to?’”
Strong also drew a distinction between Disney‘s approach and that of Jacobs and the show’s writers.
“It seems like [Disney] were okay with it being different, and that Michael and the writers were the ones that kind of wanted to look at it more as a continuation,” he said.
Fishel didn’t disagree.
“It was definitely more Michael and the writers,” she said.
For her, that made the experience particularly frustrating because the promise of a new show was part of what attracted her to the project in the first place.
Fishel said the experience was “really frustrating” because “one of the reasons I agreed to do” Girl Meets World was that purported distance from the original show. But she doesn’t want that comment interpreted as saying she would have turned down the sequel if she’d known how closely it would mirror Boy Meets World.
“I would have done it no matter what. I’m not trying to say, ‘I would have said no, had he said ‘I’m going to try to make it as Boy Meets World as possible.”’ I just would have probably at least had a better understanding of what I was agreeing to.”
Strong had his own thoughts on what the show ultimately became. In his view, Girl Meets World wasn’t really a continuation of Boy Meets World so much as a series built around memories of it.
“I think a continuation of Boy Meets World would have been better,” he said. “What it is is like a reflection of Boy Meets World. It’s these weird homages and it’s commenting on Boy Meets World and trying to reflect some of the themes and characters from Boy Meets World and reference them, but not actually continue them.”
Fishel agreed that a “reflection” would have been a better way to approach the sequel. Instead, she felt the original series continued to loom over it.
“I feel like a reflection is what should have been the goal, and what ended up happening is it was in the shadow of [the original],” she said. “That was a self-imposed shadow, and every time there was an opportunity for the new show to step out into the sun, the shadow would come back.”
Girl Meets World ran for three seasons on Disney Channel between 2014 and 2017, while Boy Meets World aired for seven seasons on ABC from 1993 to 2000.
Fishel also believes the change in networks presented another challenge. Boy Meets World had been a broadcast sitcom on ABC, while Girl Meets World landed on Disney Channel, which she said made it harder to reach the adults who had grown up watching the original.
“Even if every person who had loved Boy Meets World [had watched], you’re not going to get that many,” she said. “It’s cable, you’re not going to get that many adults who are going to pay for cable and then start watching. They were catering to the wrong audience.”