For reference, the three stars shot to fame as child stars on the ABC sitcom Boy Meets World, which was on our screens between 1993 and 2000. The show chronicled the lives of its central characters from the age of 11 until the end of college, with Ben Savage playing the titular “boy,” Cory Matthews, Danielle starring as his love interest, Topanga, Rider as his best friend, Shawn, and Will as his older brother, Eric.
In 2014, the characters were revived for a sequel series, Girl Meets World, which followed Cory and Topanga’s daughter, Riley, played by Rowan Blanchard, with Sabrina Carpenter starring as Riley’s best friend, Maya.
Danielle and Ben starred in every episode of Girl Meets World, and Rider made regular appearances as Shawn became a key character in the story later in the series. Will also made guest appearances, with most other major cast members reprising their roles, too. In addition, Danielle and Rider directed episodes of the series.
The show aired for three seasons until 2017, and in more recent years, Danielle has admitted that she didn’t really enjoy her time on it. Speaking on Pod Meets World early last year, she said that it was “a very, very difficult set,” and that she “went into it” hoping to recreate the joyous experience of Boy Meets World, but “it just wasn’t.”
She said that the environment was “tumultuous” and she often felt ostracized and criticized. All of these feelings came to a head when Maitland Ward, who played Rachel on Boy Meets World, appeared on the podcast for a now-infamous episode during which she had a fiery argument with the hosts. Here, Maitland accused Danielle of ignoring her when she visited the Girl Meets World set, having previously suggested that she was jealous of her.
Danielle was surprised by Maitland’s claims, and said that she had inadvertently been more subdued on set due to her personal experience on the show. She added that she didn’t intend to be cold towards Maitland, concluding: “I’m sorry that you thought it was about you.”
And Danielle had another difficult conversation about Girl Meets World on a special episode of the podcast that dropped on New Year’s Eve, where she, Will, and Rider had a surprisingly candid on-mic discussion about rewatching it.
For context, since 2022, the hosts have been working through Boy Meets World by watching an episode most weeks and discussing their memories and thoughts afterward. They are about to start rewatching the final season, and this is what led to the seriously frank debate about what they should do next, exposing the fact that they aren’t all on the same page. Like, at all.
It started when Danielle confirmed that they had signed a new deal with iHeart Podcasts, saying: “We will officially be continuing our Pod Meets World podcast well beyond the end of our recaps, which is going to be a bittersweet feeling.” She then joked: “We don’t know what we’re doing, but they want us to keep talking!”
“I mean, do we want to have a real conversation about it right now, real quick?” Danielle asked Will and Rider. “You guys have totally turned the corner on something, and it makes me a little mad.”
“I know. I know what we have to do next,” Will replied, to which Danielle responded: “And I just won’t do it.”
As Rider expressed his agreement, Danielle argued: “It’s not though because it’s…” she then clarified to listeners: “We’re talking about Girl Meets World… It’s not our show.”
“It was your show, and Rider directed most of them!” Will exclaimed, and Rider echoed: “You were there every single day; I directed 18 episodes.”
“I was not the star of Girl Meets World,” Danielle countered. “And to do a show with an adult lens that was a show for six to nine-year-olds… To talk about it and break it down the way we have done the very mature adult and well-roundedness of Boy Meets World… To do it for a show for six to nine-year-olds, where there are other children who are the stars… I don’t think we can do it fairly! And I don’t know if we have a good perspective for it!”
“Well, we don’t have the same distance, right? It’s closer in time, only a decade ago,” Rider replied. “We are not as intimately involved as we were with Boy Meets World, obviously, so it’s a different experience. So much of the podcast going back to watch Boy Meets World is: ‘Do you remember that? Can you believe we did that? Can you believe that happened?’ None of that kind of stuff and the sort of collision of perspectives that we had throughout this experience of adult us looking at children us… That won’t be there. What, instead, will be there is an analysis and discussion of a continuation of the Boy Meets World universe.”
“I feel like there’s a story that we’ve been absorbing and discussing on this podcast with Topanga and Cory and Shawn and Eric that continues into the Girl Meets World universe,” he went on. “And I feel like if we come at it from: ‘Well, let’s just see where those characters go and discuss how they ended up…’”
“But we could do that by picking the, say, five to 10 episodes that actually talk about those characters, we could just do a watch of those,” Danielle offered, but Rider asked: “But why not look at the whole universe and discuss the, like, official Boy Meets World storylines?”
“I take Rider’s seat in this one because I literally never saw one episode other than the one I was in,” Will added. “I’ve never seen Girl Meets World, so I’m truly going in blind, I have never seen the show.”
“And I haven’t seen most of the episodes,” Rider said, before acknowledging that they don’t have the same “ownership” over Girl Meets World as they did Boy, but they could come at the show with a “lighter touch.” He said: “There’s a lot of story there. For me, going back to Girl Meets World, I’d have conversations with Ben and Michael [Jacobs, the creator of both shows], and everybody else, and they would remember things from Boy Meets World and have to explain them to me, what was going on, because I’d never seen Boy Meets World.”
“If I saw those things, I’d be closer to them now than when I was performing them on Girl Meets World,” he explained, stating that he would like to see all of the references and callbacks in Girl Meets World now that he will understand them better.
Danielle then admitted: “The argument that convinces me more than anything is just that it feels like if we’re going to ever do Girl Meets World, we should do it immediately after Boy Meets World. Versus, like… My preference, honestly, what I’m fighting for, I want to do Friends. I’ve never seen every episode of Friends.”
“We could do that after Girl Meets World,” Rider said, and Danielle agreed: “That’s what I’m saying. It’d be silly to go from Boy Meets World [to Friends], it does only make sense to just continue the story and put the button on it… We also don’t have to take three years to do three seasons.”
“We can bust through them really quickly, and again, nothing is forever, if we’re 10 episodes in and we’re like: ‘We don’t like this,’ we can just stop,” Will suggested, but Danielle said that she didn’t “like that idea.”
The trio then debated how much of their listenership would have watched at least a couple of episodes of Girl Meets World over the years, with Rider believing there’d be a considerable overlap while Danielle and Will disagreed.
Will theorized that the listeners who had kids might have given Girl Meets World a try, but others would be wary of ruining their memory of Boy Meets World, or simply have no interest in watching a Disney Channel show as adults. But Rider clarified that while he believes the “Venn diagram” of Boy Meets World and Girl Meets World viewers would be a minor overlap, the one with Pod Meets World listeners would be significantly higher as they are clearly “interested in Boy Meets World-related content.”
“Unless what they’re doing is what I’m doing, which is they’ve never seen it either and they’re like: ‘I guess if they’re going to watch it, I’ll watch it too,’ and they’re going to watch along,” Will suggested, but Danielle argued: “Or: ‘I guess if they’re gonna watch it I’ll stop listening to the podcast!’”
Will then said they’d view the show with the context that it is for kids, not with an adult lens, before saying that they all know the child stars on the series were “awesome,” with Rider adding that he “loved working with” Rowan and Sabrina, and has “only positive memories.”
As the heated conversation fizzled down, Danielle joked with listeners about how much they have let them into the inner workings of the podcast, with Rider exclaiming in response: “I thought we were signing off! Instead, we’re like: ‘Let’s talk about it! On air! Right now!’”
Personally, I’d love for the Pod Meets World gang to recap Girl Meets World next to wrap up their characters’ storylines — but be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below!