The first thing you think of when discussing Boy Meets World isn’t sex, even if you did have a poster of Topanga on your wall. But Rider Strong, who played Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World, has opened up about how the showrunners botched handling the matter in a professional way.
On a recent episode of the rewatch podcast “Pod Meets World”–which Strong co-hosts with Danielle Fishel (Topanga Lawrence) and Will Friedle (Eric Matthews)–Rider Strong put Boy Meets World writers and producers on blast for not promoting a healthy approach to sex. “I remember being very upset during that entire week…I was very upset with the adults on our set — the way that they were approaching this, specifically because we were not discussing safe sex.”
The Boy Meets World episode Rider Strong is referring to is season five’s “Prom-ises, Prom-ises”, a once-banned episode that focused on Rider Strong’s Shawn and Ben Savage’s Cory Matthews trying to lose their virginity to their respective girlfriends.
“The fact that we would not bring up Cory and Topanga using condoms or having a discussion about birth control at all,” Rider Strong said, “and yet the entire episode was about whether ‘will they’ or ‘will they not’.” He claims to have approached Boy Meets World co-creator Michael Jacobs about this, but Jacobs brushed him off. “I felt, at the time, that that was incredibly irresponsible.”
The podcast has proven to be not just a favorite for Boy Meets World fans, but the spot for various revelations about the ABC series. Earlier this year, Trina McGee, who played Angela, discussed her feelings on being left out of the show’s series finale.
What do you think of Rider Strong’s comments about how showrunners handled sex on Boy Meets World? Let us know in the comments below.