Boy Meets World Stars Trash Girl Meets World Pilot: 'What Are You Doing With The Legacy Of This Show?'

When "Girl Meets World" premiered on Disney Channel in 2014, TVLine readers gave the "Boy Meets World" spin-off pilot an average grade of "B-." The hosts of "Pod Meets World" would probably consider that pretty generous.

Now that the "Boy Meets World" rewatch podcast has worked its way through all 158 episodes of the original series, hosts Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong, and Will Friedle — all of whom starred on "Boy Meets World" and went on to appear on "Girl Meets World" in various capacities — have moved on to recapping the sequel. And if you thought the trio was overly critical of "Boy Meets World," you haven't heard anything yet.

This week's recap episode tackles the "Girl Meets World" pilot, which introduces viewers to leading ladies Riley (Rowan Blanchard) and Maya (Sabrina Carpenter), and reunites fans with grown-up Cory (Ben Savage) and Topanga (Fishel). Right away, the hosts note that the show did a disservice to Blanchard by casting Carpenter, who was several years older, as her on-screen counterpart.

"Unfortunately, I think it's a little bit of an unbalancing," Strong points out, adding that "it's not Rowan's fault" as the writers are "not giving Rowan much help here in terms of character." Friedle agrees, saying, "Rowan is adorable, but when Sabrina walks on screen, you're like, 'That's the star.'" 

From there, the hosts lament Cory's "low-energy" introduction, crawling in through the bay window in Riley's bedroom. "This is the way you introduce Cory, crawling through a window?" Strong asks. "Cory Matthews is back, he should get a big entrance! Instead, it was like, 'Who's that crawling in all awkward and weird? ... Oh, it's Cory.'" The whole set-up makes him "so mad."

Speaking of that bay window, when Fishel explains that series creator Michael Jacobs opened the pilot with a scene at the window in Riley's bedroom because he "loved this idea of important conversations taking place in the bay window," Strong calls it "the worst decision you could make."

"It's energy-sucking," Strong says of the bay window set-up. "You're just stuck with two people not facing each other, not talking the way human beings actually talk to each other. It's a really bad choice. I thought it developed naturally. I didn't realize it was a conscious decision from the opening moments of the show — and man does it just put us on flatline." Friedle agrees, calling it "not a visually dynamic choice."

Danielle Fishel later finds herself "cringing" at the scene in which Riley and Maya first encounter Lucas (Peyton Meyer) on the subway, which immediately establishes him as Riley's crush before she even knows his name.

"I very early on had said this was not what I wanted," Fishel says. "Can we acknowledge there's a cute boy in the classroom? Of course. We have to introduce Peyton Meyer. But why in the pilot episode are we already introducing that, just based on the way he looks, she has a crush on him, and that's going to continue and become a love triangle from the beginning?" 

After breaking down the entire scene, in which Maya confidently coaches a timid Riley on how to talk to boys, Fishel says, "This dialogue! No kids talk like this."

In fact, the hosts have a lot to say about the pilot's dialogue, with Fishel referring to it as "a bunch of word salad." At one point, Will Friedle asks his co-hosts to decide which line is more on-the-nose: Jackée Harry's sassy subway character telling the girls, "You ain't got no hunk? You ain't got no story!" or when Cory tells Riley, "This was my world. Now make it your own."

In terms of the show's "over-written" dialogue, Fishel reminds the audience that "Girl Meets World" was a Disney Channel project, which left less room for ambiguity and nuance than "Boy Meets World" had as a primetime show on ABC.

Speaking to the pilot overall, Rider Strong asks, "Was the reaction online immediately, What the hell is this?' Now that I've [rewatched 'Boy Meets World'] and was so moved by the quality ... now I'm angry. I'm like, 'What are you doing with the legacy of this show?' Which I feel like most people must have been feeling."

Will Friedle took an optimistic approach, assuming that this is just a "muddled, crazy pilot that they rewrote 100 times ... and as the show moves on, it's going to loosen up and find its stride." But both Strong and Danielle Fishel reply, "I don't think so."

"When I think back on the [18] episodes I directed, I spent a lot of time wrestling with what I've been describing here," Strong says. "I don't get what this character wants. ... There's five motivations behind everything. I'm so confused. ... I don't actually know what's happening in most of this episode."

And then there's the end of the pilot, which includes a cameo from William Daniels as Mr. Feeny, Cory and the gang's lifelong mentor from the original show. It begins with Cory seeing a poster of Mr. Feeny in the subway ("Is Mr. Feeny famous in the tri-state area?" the hosts wonder), before a vision of the character appears in front of the poster to tell him, "Well done, Mr. Matthews."

"What is well done?" Strong asks. "What did he do? What is Feeny championing him for? And why is Feeny on a poster? It breaks my brain."

To their credit, the hosts don't have only negative things to say about the "Girl Meets World" pilot. 

Will Friedle says the overall cast is "phenomenal," even admitting, "they were better as child actors than we were at this point [on 'Boy Meets World']." Sabrina Carpenter, in particular, is an obvious breakout to him: "She walks on screen, she's a star. This is what she was born to do. She was born to entertain."

Still, they can't shake the feeling that something is off about the foundation of "Girl Meets World." Rider Strong says the show feels less like a continuation of "Boy Meets World" and more like a reflection on it, while Danielle Fishel takes it one step further.

"I feel like a reflection should have been the goal, Fishel says, but "Boy Meets World" ended up being a "self-imposed shadow" that always loomed over the spin-off. "Every time there was a chance for the new show to step into the sun, the shadow would come back."

The hosts have a lot more to say (both good and bad) about the "Girl Meets World" pilot in the full, two-hour "Pod Meets World" episode, which is currently available to stream wherever you get your podcasts. Do you agree that the pilot was rough, and do you feel the show improved over time? Drop a comment with your thoughts below.