Rider Strong says ‘Girl Meets World’ faced content limitations due to Disney Channel
In what may very well take the cake for least-surprising news on the internet, Disney Channel’s “Girl Meets World” may not have been the show it could’ve been simply because of the network it aired on. This is a go-figure moment if we ever heard of one, largely because of the fact that this network has a very specific audience, and they’re not going to let any of their programming get that weird or controversial. The best thing that they can hope for is to subtly bury a message into some of their episodes, which is what we think they did earlier this season with a story about the police.
In commenting on the subject of what the show could and could not do, the actor behind Shawn Hunter in Rider Strong (who appeared in several episodes of “Girl Meets World,” and even married Maya’s mother in one of them) said the following on Kevin Pollack’s Chat Show Podcast recently:
“When you do a tonal shift like that it either — I think ‘Boy Meets World’ missed the mark almost as often as it nailed the mark, honestly — for some people that tonal shift will never work. It’s just like ‘Woah, I want it to be funny!’ But for others I think what ‘Boy Meets World’ and ‘Girl Meets World’ tapped into is that there’s actually a huge segment of that age group, you know … the target age group from 8 all the way up to 16ish, that is very melodramatic and that does see life as ‘It’s all fun,’ and then the rug gets pulled out from under you and you’re, like, crying. That sort of emotional swing. And I think [creator] Michael [Jacobs], to his credit, really wrote well for that [age group], and he still does. We’ve had some very dramatic episodes [of ‘Girl Meets World’]. I don’t think as dramatic as ‘Boy,’ mostly because we’re on Disney Channel and they won’t allow us to. I think had Michael had his way, ‘Girl Meets World’ would have swung just as extreme. And I think sometimes, as I said, it misses, and other times when it hits it really touches people and sticks with them.”
In retrospect, we absolutely do feel like Jacobs did his best when it comes to delivering stories that would appease both adults who grew up on the show and also young people who were checking it out for the first time. Unfortunately, we do think that the network did at times make this an impossibility to please everyone. The content and the story of the show at times skewed a little too young even for nostalgic fans, while at the same time there were a number of cameos that new fans would not know or understand in a million years. Had the show started on a Netflix or an ABC, we have a feeling that there are certain aspects of this that would have been easier.
Do you think the show would’ve benefited more from airing on another network? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
The penultimate episode of “Girl Meets World,” entitled “Girl Meets Sweet Sixteen,” is going to be airing on the Disney Channel on Friday night. If you do want to get some further news right now all about that, just be sure to head over to the link here! (Photo: Disney Channel.)