Jake Peffer reviews the pilot episode of Girl Meets World….
It has been 14 years since Boy Meets World ended its seven season run on ABC. Cory, Topanga, Shawn and Eric were all moving on to New York to start new lives, finally leaving their childhood behind. Now in Girl Meets World we follow Cory and Topanga’s new family who now have a son, Auggie, and a daughter, Riley, which the show revolves around. I got the chance to watch the first episode of the new series and it ended up being just as I suspected – not all that great.
Like I mentioned before this series follows Riley (Rowan Blanchard) as she goes through life learning new things each and everyday. She has a new best friend named Maya (Sabrina Carpenter) and she has a crush on a new boy in her class named Lucas (Peyton Meyer). Speaking of her class, her teacher just so happens to be her goofy dad Cory (Ben Savage) who we followed in Boy Meets World as we got to see him grow up and learn about the world around him.
It would be easy to try and compare this new series with the original, but I’d rather not do that because this is a new show for a new generation and that’s what fans of the original series need to realize. So without any comparison, my biggest complaint here is the fact that the Disney Channel is the company that picked this show up. Watching the pilot it just feels like won’t be any room to really explore real life situations that occur when growing up. Sure they can hit the basics but being on Disney is going to limit what they can really do with this series.
My other big complaint is that the episode just isn’t that funny. I wasn’t expecting a laugh a minute show but I was expecting a little more than I got. It is really hard to judge a show like this just by one episode because it does have room to grow, but honestly I don’t see it growing much over the course of its first season. Seeing Ben Savage and Danielle Fishel as Cory and Topanga again is great and Rowan Blanchard and Sabrina Carpenter are both charming as the two young leads. However, none of the young male leads make any kind of impact whatsoever. The pilot also includes a very brief cameo by William Daniels who played the beloved Mr. Feeny, but it feels rather pointless in the context of the episode.
While I don’t see this series really catching on with fans of Boy Meets World, except for those only watching to see characters from the old series pop up, it does have the potential to be a solid show for a new generation of kids and teenagers. So while I wasn’t completely sold by the first episode, I have no doubt that it will be one of the biggest hits of the summer.
Jake Peffer
Originally published June 6, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
