Late night, a dark Manhattan stage: pan right. A figure, a man, head down. The lights lift slightly and his head rolls up. He takes a long drag on an e-cigarette. It’s a confident motion, and one that we’ve seen before. This is Samuel L. Jackson, the mighty, the cool. He exhales, and then begins to speak: “Boy Meets World/ boy greets world/hello world”—the hand lifts, the palm opens—“I am Cory Matthews/short, and average, head full of curls/ the year, 1993.” There’s rhythmic percussion and bass-plucking in the background. “We see two boys who lack both brains and brawn/Cory Matthews and Hunter—uh—Hunter, comma, Shawn.”
Jackson’s host, Jimmy Fallon, knows a thing or two about Internet clickbait. He’s gotten Michelle Obama to perform the “Evolution of Mom Dancing,” and convinced her husband to “slow-jam the news.” He’s spilled raw eggs on Tom Cruise and danced in wrapping paper with Justin Timberlake. But little gets the Buzzfeed generation going like nostalgia. VH1 led the nineties-revisitation wave just five years after the nineties were through, with the launch of “I Love the 90s,” and New York regularly offers up blog posts like “It’s Time to Revisit the Celebrity Scandals of 1998.” Which hits on why Fallon, in April, 2014, invited Jackson, the Bible-quoting badass of “Pulp Fiction,” to recite slam poetry about “Boy Meets World.” Whether Susan Sontag would have called it camp, kitsch, or schmaltz hardly matters: what could be more shareable?
“Boy Meets World,” which aired from 1993 to 2000, was the Platonic ideal of wholesomeness, and future anthropologists will have a ball defining why our sordid age still holds on so tightly to it. It told the tale of an average boy; his best pal, from the other side of the train tracks; his sweetheart, Topanga; his kindly principal, who is also his neighbor; and his family. The whole show is now on DVD, as an excitement-builder in the run-up to “Girl Meets World,” which will follow Cory and Topanga’s teenage daughter, Riley. (The first trailer for “Girl Meets World” was released on Thursday, trending on Facebook.) I can’t tell whether the target audience is children or me, but who needs a fresh reason to stay at home and binge-watch? Ben Savage, who played Cory, and Danielle Fishel, who played Topanga, the strong and pretty girl we wanted to be, still pop up regularly in the blogosphere.
For me, the lodestar of “Boy Meets World” was Cory’s best friend, Shawn Hunter—in Jackson’s tone poem: “Hair parted down the middle, jacket made of leather/Alas, one man’s trailer trash is another man’s treasure.” He knew a thing or two about rebellion. As a pre-teen, I cut out the blue-eyed face of the actor who played him, Rider Strong, from magazines, and pasted it on my wall. I didn’t understand Dylan yet, but Strong, who spent seven seasons incarnating Shawn, was my anti-JTT: the growling and naughty misérable who slouched about in cool-guy pose but wasn’t afraid to feel.
The other day I spoke by phone to Strong, who was in his home town, San Francisco—because why let this opportunity pass? For all my anxiety about talking to my first celebrity crush, the banter flowed; Strong speaks in high and enthused tones that you’d recognize—he’s done voice work for Disney, too—but steers clear of dopey. From 1988 to 1993, Strong told me, ABC had a hit with “The Wonder Years,” portraying the cozy but still terrifying realities of coming of age. Its brilliant representative of true-blue American childhood was Kevin Arnold, played by Fred Savage. When “The Wonder Years” went off the air, Strong explained, ABC needed another family-oriented hit, and what better heir to Fred than his kid brother, Ben? There was something about the Savages: “They were both just ridiculously cute, belonged on every diaper commercial,” Strong said. And they “both had the perfect combination of intelligence and humor. Both were willing to be vulnerable in a way that child actors weren’t—you feel the world pouring into them, and they’re reacting to it very honestly.”
Initially, “Boy Meets World” centered on Cory’s gang of three. But a chemistry emerged between Savage and Strong, who had met two years earlier and were friends off camera, “which translated on camera to chemistry, timing, confidence in each other. By episode five, we’d realized we could land on each other.” The other boy got fired, and the network had “the first bromance” on its hands. The teen-age actors’ hormonal chemistry influenced the characters, too. The writers saw the “angsty” Strong—“I was gravitating toward mopier music”—and turned Shawn into “the site for all the drama on the show. What that translated to was: screw up his life, have him run away from home, abandoned by parents, kill his father. I think the writers saw that I wanted to cry.”
Strong was thirteen when he signed on, and “already cynical—I had a girlfriend in my home town. I was tortured to be pulled away from her.” The show didn’t end until he was twenty. But, as he warned me against signing on to TV pilots that come attached to six-year contracts, his gratitude was clear, especially toward the studio teacher David Combs. “I was reading John Keats at thirteen years old. I remember watching the O.J. Simpson trial on set.” That’s certainly not what I knew of Strong, but, then, what does a civilian kid like me really understand about child stardom? He described “a sense of alienation that comes with fame in general, and certainly the type of fame that I had—this particular teen-idol thing that I still don’t understand. When you’re thirteen and someone wants to interview you—.” He paused. “I didn’t have a distinction between People magazine and Bop.”
“At home, I was always being told, you’re interesting because of the things you say. But, at that age, it was all, what are your favorite pizza toppings? What do you look for in a girl?” Painting himself as a misunderstood teen, Strong emitted the telephone version of an eye roll: “I know, I was listening to the Counting Crows, and all Adam Duritz is doing is bitching about being famous.” But understand, he said, “I grew up on fifteen acres of redwood; my father was a firefighter. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to private school, but I went to Columbia because I could pay on my own.” Like a wave, Strong would begin with a thought—“I’ve been lucky”—crescendo with a “Does anybody care what I’m doing now?,” and then add a dose of humility—“I understand, there’s no reason.”
His star has faded less than he might have expected. Danielle Fishel told me, “Ben, Rider, Will”—Friedle, another young actor on the show—“and I have all talked about how much more we got recognized after the show was off the air than when it was on air. I do think the nature of celebrity has changed and the Internet, paparazzi, the public, and celebrities are all partially responsible.” Strong sounded as though it long ago stopped surprising him that “people don’t give me crap in bars. It’s a pretty sentimental show, but, when you’re a young person, sentimentality doesn’t bother you so much.”
He told me about an episode of “This American Life” featuring Starlee Kine, called “Reruns.” In it, Kine tells Ira Glass that she never watched “Boy Meets World” as a kid, and doesn’t think very highly of it. But, she says, “It didn’t even matter. … I can imagine little kids being in really comfortable, carpeted family rooms and laying with their elbows propped up and watching ‘Boy Meets World’ and feeling really safe. Because it’s like the safest thing in the world. … Knowing that there’s kids out there who feel secure is enough for me to feel comforted by it and watch it every time it’s on.” Her take, as Strong paraphrased it, with the precision of someone who’s listened to the segment more than once, was that “I don’t think it’s very good, but, when I watch it, I feel like I’m walking into an American living room, and I like the way I feel about the other people watching it. The consistent values.”
Child stars grow older, too. Strong told me that much of his excitement for “Girl Meets World” was about the fact that “it’s not just for kids. It’s a family show, like ‘Boy Meets World’ was. Now, with a lot of shows, you plop your kid in front of the TV and walk away. It’s all over the top, to accommodate short attention spans.” His character was wise beyond his years in the era before Stewie on “Family Guy” and Manny on “Modern Family”—kids who act, shrewdly and strangely, like adults. Rarely on TV do we have kids who stand in for grownups and the fullness of their experience, the way the Savage brothers did.
Strong would rather direct now—he thinks his involvement in “Girl Meets World” will be mostly on that end. (Notably, in 2008, Strong and his brother made an ad for Obama, which became the first political commercial to play on Comedy Central.) He also puts out a literary podcast and tweets about Szymborska, Ferlinghetti, and homophones. “It’s very strange to be the cross of other people’s nostalgia, for people to have these pictures of me, something I signed when I was thirteen,” he told me. Strange, but no doubt lucky: Samuel L. Jackson is waxing slam-poetic about his leather jacket on “The Tonight Show” more than twenty years later.
Photograph of Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong (top), and Ben Savage by Craig Sjodin/ABC/
Getty.
