Rider Strong says Boy Meets World dropped the ball on another serious episode of the show in which Shawn abuses alcohol.
Tonight, on a very special episode of Boy Meets World, Shawn gets crunk…Boy Meets World, like many sitcoms (especially of the Disney-backed TGIF variety), had its share of episodes that took on serious issues, hitting on everything from child abuse to teenage sex to cults. But one episode that still sticks with Rider Strong is “If You Can’t Be With the One You Love”, which focused on Shawn Hunter developing an alcohol dependency, something he doesn’t think the show handled well at all.
As Rider Strong remembered of the season five episode of Pod Meets World (the Boy Meets World rewatch podcast he co-hosts), Shawn was seeing “having a good time with Cory and doing handstands and peeing on cop cars and just, like, woohoo, fun loving. And then in that second half, it’s as if he’s a 45-year-old alcoholic who’s like, ‘I can’t stop, but I gotta keep doing this.’ I don’t think that’s realistic.” He added, “The real problem that I see is it’s actually a disservice to people. The real issue with drinking is that often it’s sneakier, it’s weirder, it’s slower. It slowly takes over people’s lives…to condense it is to oversimplify the issue in a way. The counterargument I’m making in my own head is that it’s for children. And for children, you just wanna see that drinking is bad. Stay away from it for as long as you can. Do it when you’re older.”
The episode found Shawn becoming so belligerent that at one point he shoves his girlfriend Angela (Trina McGee), in one of the biggest slights to her character because, as co-host Danielle Fishel noted, Shawn got to keep her as his girlfriend without facing that set of consequences.
Overall, Rider Strong insists that those behind the scenes of Boy Meets World dropped the ball on that episode, saying that by trying to break down that sort of story into one block of your Friday night did no justice to the seriousness of the topic. He, too, felt the same way about “Prom-ises, Prom-ises”, the once-banned episode that he said mishandled the topic of sex and birth control.
What do you remember about this episode of Boy Meets World? How do you think the matter was handled?