It should be easy to write off Boy Meets World as a blip on the lengthy timeline of family-friendly sitcoms. The show opted for simplicity over a high concept hook: at the center was the “Boy,” Cory Matthews, a regular kid who navigated the ups and downs of life along with his mom, dad, older brother Eric, younger sister Morgan, his best friend Shawn, romantic interest Topanga, and wise sage of a teacher Mr. Feeny. As a well-intentioned, by-the-books comedy, the conclusion of Boy Meets World should have spelled the end of the series in viewers’ TV Guides and minds.
But Boy never disappeared. After a seven-season run and 158 episodes, the series — which aired its finale on ABC in 2000 — continues to remain popular. The sitcom thrives on DVD and ABC Family reruns, and has been reinterpreted by passionate fans thanks to the Internet’s thriving GIF culture.
How did Boy Meets World‘s legacy survive? By seizing an endless number of opportunities in the sitcom formula.
One episode in particular encapsulates everything the show continually got right, a half hour experiment that was as risky as the show was heartfelt: “And Then There Was Shawn,” the series’ horror episode, which was routinely revived during the Halloween season (the episode, strangely enough, originally aired during sweeps on Feb. 27, 1998). The Season 5 episode was a teen slasher parody that still, in true Boy spirit, led to an important life lesson for Shawn and helped an audience come to terms with Cory and Topanga’s breakup. To do so, it brought together the entire cast for a “whodunnit?” mystery through the high school that strayed from Boy‘s traditional format — not only was it extremely graphic for its young viewers, but multiple characters met their maker throughout the half-hour. Despite the episode being as bizarre as it was bloody, “And Then There Was Shawn” became instantly memorable for not only the TGIF set who reference it annually on Twitter, but for Boy‘s cast and crew as well.
So, in the spirit of the Halloween season, Hollywood.com assembled the cast and crew of Boy Meets World to discuss how “And Then There Was Shawn” organically came to fruition, an evolutionary process that started at the very beginning of the show’s creation:
Michael Jacobs, creator of Boy Meets World: I was just wrapping up Dinosaurs … I went to the president of Disney television and said, “In all of these shows that are being done — Family Ties, Growing Pains — you have your Michael J. Fox, your Kirk Cameron. Big brothers. But what about the kids in the middle? The younger kids? They have lives.” We started looking at it, and I got more and more jazzed by the betrayal that happens when the older brother, who has slept in your room as long as you can remember, decides you’re not the one he’s going to take to the ballgame. He’s going to take his girlfriend. The first date episode, eternal in situation comedy, as told by the point of view from the younger brother, is a whole different television show. So I thought, what if there’s a kid who was an everyman who loses his touchstone, his older brother, and he’s lost and confused in the world?
Jeff McCracken, Boy Meets World producer and director of “And Then There Was Shawn”: Michael loves to write kids. That’s his forte. He’s tried to write adults… whatever [laughs], I’m not going to denigrate Michael. He writes kids really well.
Jacobs: He said, “I noticed that you like writing for kids.” “I do like writing for kids.” “Why do you like writing for kids?” And I said, “I like writing for kids because I’m going to have some and they won’t listen to me, but they’ll watch my television shows and my characters and they won’t know [they’ve] been listening to me.” And that’s what happened. I have four kids and I noticed the lessons I taught them have lasted their lives, but they didn’t get them from me. They got them from Cory Matthews.
McCracken: [Michael] had done My Two Dads with Greg Evigan, Paul Reiser, and Staci Keanan … He tells the same story again and again really well. He’s very good at tapping into the consciousness of the day.
Jacobs: All I wanted to ever do was write a show that never spoke down to kids, because I thought that was primarily what was happening in the world of teenage television. Let’s speak up to them. They understand far more. When you look at what they’re looking at, they’re not tracking their generation. They’re tracking the next generation.
Rider Strong, “Shawn Hunter”: Michael was both the heart and brains of the show. Every week, sitcoms have two “run-throughs,” where the cast performs the show for the writers, producers, and network executives. Afterwards, the Executive Producer will give notes to the actors. On most shows, that means five to 10 minutes of notes. Michael rarely did less than an hour. Sometimes over two.
Ben Savage, “Cory Matthews”: Other people would be “la dee da” [when approaching shows]. I’ve worked on other sitcoms — and I’m not saying other shows don’t try as hard — but with Boy Meets World everyone was so passionate about every aspect of the show. It stood alone.
Jacobs: Bill Daniels [Cory’s teacher Mr. Feeny], who I gave very few notes to (nor did I have to), would sit through all of the note sessions. He wanted to be part of what was happening with the kids. In the beginning, he pulled me in — this is year one … during the very youth-oriented plot lines — and Bill called me to the set once, and I was sitting in my chair and he said to me, “Michael, how long exactly am I going to have to sit by this little fence [Feeny’s stomping ground outside the Matthews’ home]?” I said, “Seven years, Bill.” And he said, “No!”
Strong: He’d go page by page through the script, discussing character, theme, you name it. And he would reference everything from specific episodes of Taxi to Noël Coward plays. And he would quote them verbatim. I not only learned about acting, but storytelling in general. I don’t think I would be the actor, writer, or director I am without those note sessions.
Over the course of Boy Meets World‘s first five seasons, Jacobs and McCracken wrapped their work on Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs, earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination for producing Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, and continued to develop new projects. But multitasking never took a toll on the show, with the cast and writers’ interest in Boy continuing as strong as ever.
Strong: It’s hard to remember all the seasons distinctly, but I think Season 5 was probably one of the most fun. Michael Jacobs had spent three years sort of coming and going with the show — he had been trying to develop other pilots that had all failed. But Season 5 he came back strong and I remember feeling like the show hit a new groove.
Jacobs: I had three [shows] on the air. I was trying to nurture other shows while keeping very sharp tabs — reading all the scripts, going to all the tapings — on Boy. The other shows ran or didn’t run, and I was able to come back to it.
McCracken: Michael asked me to direct the third season, which led to the fourth, fifth — I started directing all the seasons.
Strong: That year, in real life, I started going to college — the producers of Boy were giving me my mornings to attend classes, and I was splitting my nights between a dorm room the school required me to have, and this huge loft I found in downtown LA. So during that season, I was entering adult life and figuring out how to navigate school, work, different sets of friends… girls.
Savage: We were growing up on the show. I was applying to college, doing plays. Moving on. There was a lot going on. But in terms of my commitment to the show, my expectations to Michael — that didn’t change.
Danielle Fishel, “Topanga”: We were all juniors/seniors in high school and had a lot of other things on our plates. The show was usually pretty good at evolving and some of my favorite moments were when the show broke the fourth wall.
Will Friedle, “Eric”: When the show started, we were very young and still trying to find our characters… By Season 5 we were much more comfortable, which made the entire flow of the show more natural.
Savage: In a way, we had taken such ownership of our characters, we were so protective of them, that it didn’t matter, really. We were going to make sure the integrity of the character held up.
Matthew Lawrence, “Jack”: I think coming into Season 5, they wanted to add more to the show. They wanted another guy to bounce off Will. And to have a B story line. You had Rider and Ben, and then they had me to pair up with Will. A little fresh blood into a situation that was already really good. I was very happy to [be that].
Jacobs: Nowhere in Season 5 or Season 6 or Season 7 did we ever think, “We’ve already run the gamut on possible storylines for where the show could go.” The audience, at least in my experience, was so appreciative of it.
Strong: Artistically, of course, I wished I was on a more interesting, cutting-edge show or doing movies that suited my own tastes more — things like the Richard Linklater or Tarantino films of the time that I loved. But personally, our set was a haven: an incredibly tight-knit group of supportive, talented people. And so when I think about it now, a lot of the reason I was able to handle my first steps into the big bad world was precisely because I had this secure environment that I clocked into everyday.
Running with the idea that, in Season 5 , the Boy Meets Worldaudience understood the format, understood the characters, and understood the rules of the show, Jacobs and his team of writers had the freedom to play. And play they did, lifting the basis for “”And Then There Was Shawn”” from R-rated horror movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Jeff Menell, writer of “”And Then There Was Shawn””: I was a film reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter. Their New York film reviewer. So [before Boy], I was doing freelance writing, kind of enjoying my life.
McCracken: Jeff is a great film buff. He’s a walking library.
Menell: It was around the time of the Scream movie. That was the impetus of it. I’m the big film guy of the staff. I love movies. I saw Scream. Was very scared. And the idea came from wanting to do a Halloween show.
Strong: It was a release valve. With the dream structure, our writers were able to get away with murder. Literally.
McCracken: Once you’ve established the communication with your audience, the audience is willing to go a lot more easily. If we had tried it the first season, they would have gone, “”What the hell is this?”” They wouldn’t known what we were doing.
Menell: The way the [writers’] room worked, ideas are fished out all the time. It’s not necessarily your idea. You get assigned scripts. I did campaign to get this one because I just love movies so much. I knew I could write this one. Of all the scripts I wrote, this was certainly the fastest and the easiest and the most fun, just because of the nature of the show.
Jacobs: It was important to me that we would be proud of as many episodes during the year as we could. I would tell the staff, “”In a 22- or 24-episode season, it is inevitable that you’re going to do a dozen really good episodes, eight good episodes, and four barking dogs. In those barking dogs, it is easy for us to stay up one night and put in some iconic moment or some B-story that will propel the audience to next week. It helped us serialize Boy.
Menell: Every script on Boy Meets World was a group effort. You write a script, it gets tabled by the room. But of all my scripts, this one was changed the least.
McCracken: I’ve seen scripts that have come in and were totally rewritten from page one. Jeff Menell… it was shootable from the first draft he wrote. It would have been absolutely perfect. All we did was add a few little things. Amped up the humor.
Jacobs: “”And Then There Was Shawn”” was right out of Menell. We knew it was going to be an incredible episode — and a lot of fun. What happens is, it invigorates the staff. We know we’re having so much fun that the best of what the staff can offer [goes] into it because we know it’s going to be an incredible week.
Strong: I actually thought, “”Well, this will be fun for us, but our audience might hate it.””
Fishel: It was exciting on the page. I also loved the fact that we were going to be allowed to break character a little bit and be a little goofy. Topanga was always so rational, so breaking that up a bit was fun.
Strong: We were a primetime show. But as far as the adult world was concerned, our show didn’t even exist. Boy Meets World was hovering in this strange middle ground: We weren’t as popular as other family shows like Full House or Sabrina, but we also weren’t a crappy Saturday morning show like Saved by the Bell. And so when we stepped out of the box with an episode like this, it kind of felt like we were in our own little corner of the playground, and no one was paying attention. Which means, in a way, we were thumbing our nose at expanding our audience — and by definition, building a cult following.
The positive reactions to “And Then There Was Shawn” from the cast and crew were across the board. But there were obvious questions when it came to pulling off the intricate episode within the constraints of the traditional sitcom format. Shooting logistics were one thing. Finding clever ways to kill off castmembers — a pencil through a teenager’s head or stabbing Mr. Feeny with a pair of scissors — was another story.
McCracken: There was concern from the network. They said to us, “Nothing can be graphic.” They were all over that at the table read.
Menell: The dead Feeny was something we wondered, “”How are people going to react to that?”” But he wasn’t dead!
Jacobs: I’ll never forget something Jeff Katzenberg taught me. When he was at Disney [Katzenberg was a Studio Chairman from 1984 to 1994], I went in to him to speak about epic fantasy. His answer was that he felt it was extraordinarily important that the viewer knew the rules of the new world they were about to enter. That there were parameters that had to be set so that the audience would feel in a very stable surrounding and that they were in good hands. It helped me in my storytelling and certainly helped in the Scream episode. Rider as Shawn, through the episode, sets down the rules.
McCracken: We were going to do it in a way that was going to be fun. We wanted the shock value, we wanted to scare. But we understood that we had a young audience and we did not want them running to their parents saying it’s now a horror show and they can’t sleep for a week. I said, ‘””Look, here’s how we’re going to do this. The pencil is going to go in his head, but when he falls, he’s going to leave a pencil trail behind him. That’s going to break the suspense for the laugh.”” No blood. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do in terms of funny. The janitor in the trashcan, when he pulls him up, right before then we crack a big joke. We teed it up to see it coming. Making sure we’re wink-wink.
Fishel: We were always operating under the impression that the show was about to be canceled any minute. It was always a surprise and a relief when it was picked up so we didn’t worry too much about that.
Jacobs: As long as your numbers are up, there are two ways to go about [dealing with the network]: the way is to be very attentive and take notes. Or the other way to do it (which I always did), instead of making anyone feel like I was giving short shrift to notes, I’d keep them there longer than they’d want to be there. So if they gave you a note, you kept expanding on that note to the point where they would have to miss the next show, miss the next lunch, and didn’t want to be there. I noticed my note sessions, by year three, got incredibly short.
Menell: Michael Jacobs doesn’t back down from anyone or anything. If the network would tell him to cool it down, he would probably amp it up.
Jacobs: At that point, the numbers were good. Ted Harbert [President of ABC Entertainment from 1992 – 1996] … didn’t want to talk to me. [I was] a whiny and endless bee in [the studio’s] ear. They decided a long time ago, “”You know what, as long as the numbers are good, it’s better to avoid him and let him do what he wants.””
McCracken: The network went with this because they trusted us enough.
With the studios approval, McCraken took “And Then There Was Shawn” to his cast and crew.
McCracken: We did the table read and [the cast] all looked at me like, “”……wow.'”” They thought it would be fun. It was off the hook. But they didn’t know how we were going to shoot it. Everyone was nervous about that. But I already had it in my head. As soon as I read it, I knew. It wasn’t going to be shot like a typical show.
Friedle: I don’t think it was difficult for us to shift gears. Actually, it was probably exactly what we needed at the time.
Menell: [Jeff McCracken is] such a passionate guy. He was so excited. He gets a ton of the credit for that episode. You get a lot of different directors, but knowing he was on board, I was just happy. I knew what he would bring to it.
McCracken: By the virtue of us being a well-oiled machine, to do something like that, even with special effects… [the network] didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I said, “”don’t worry.”” That was the joy of it. Inventing the way to do it. The week before we had a hiatus so that week they were building the set for us. We created fourth walls.
Strong: Jeff McCracken was an actor’s biggest advocate. He started out as an actor himself and he made us feel like we could do no wrong, and he always treated us as equals, despite being at least 30 years older (and about four feet taller — seriously, he’s ridiculously tall) than any of us. We trusted him with our very souls.
Savage: [In all the episodes] I remember lots of heated discussions about whether Cory should do this, or Topanga should put her left arm on this shoulder, or Rider should say this, or I should push this guy. When you watch it you don’t think about it, but everything was a discussion.
McCracken: It was going to be shot like a one hour. Shooting it in pieces, special shots. [We would] still invite the audience to watch, but with only a couple of scenes in front of them. [The cast] got really jazzed about that, to shoot a show like a film was fun for them. We didn’t rehearse it like a normal show — four days of rehearsal and shoot the fifth day. We had a table read, and the third day we were shooting. We shot right through the week.
Strong: The Scream episode was also one of our hardest. Jeff had made things very complicated for himself in terms of the camera coverage, and I remember him being super stressed out.
McCracken: When I was a young actor I did a Wes Craven film with Linda Blair. I had my horror chops introduced to me by a horror master. I love the genre for what it is, even acted in a couple, but never directed any.
Jacobs: There were a ton of differences in the show. It was almost shot filmic because it mimicked a film. There was plenty of it that played in front of the live audience. I’d say there was a greater percentage of pre-shooting that played in front of a live audience then we would normally do. We would pre-shoot 20 percent of a show — scenes that were difficult, scenes that involved action. I would say that show we pre-shot twice that.
Friedle: That was very rare for us. It might actually have been the only time that we ever did that. I completely understand why … We were laughing so much that it must have been a bit stressful for Michael and Jeff. We loved it. I really think it brought us all closer as a cast.
Strong: We actors could not stop laughing. I mean, it was a problem. We usually would break character to laugh once or twice an episode, but when we were filming the Scream episode, we were falling apart on every single line. That’s not an exaggeration. You know how when you were a kid and you’d get the giggles and not be able to stop for a few minutes? That’s what it was like shooting the Scream episode, except it lasted for hours.
In “And Then There Was Shawn,” the comedy comes from every direction. Slapstick humor, meta jokes, even a handful of South Park references — ther