Danielle Fishel would not have had her and Ben Savage’s characters make it to the altar on Boy Meets World if she had the choice.
In the latest episode of Boy Meets World rewatch podcast Pod Meets World, select fans were invited to ask the cast their burning questions about the sitcom. One fan wanted to know the one thing about the show the hosts and former stars Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle would change.
“I don’t think I would have Cory (Savage) and Topanga (Fishel) get married,” admitted Fishel. “I think I might have her still do the proposal and maybe he still says yes, [and] we go through the whole planning. Then, we end up deciding it’s maybe not the right choice for us now.”
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Fishel clarified that she would still want to have the couple be together. “They don’t need to be broken up,” she said. “Maybe we just save the marriage aspect for the end of the show and not spend the last full year of the show married.”
Friedle called his former co-star’s opinion a “hot take.” Rider agreed, noting it was a “hot take to have now when we haven’t gotten to that [part of the show].” The actress explained her choice, saying that after her character was married to Cory, the writers “had to come up with new [situations] upping the stakes for us.”
“I remember not loving those stakes,” she recalled. “It felt like we could have gotten more mileage out of them being together but not yet married.”
As for Friedle’s choice on what to change, he said he would’ve kept early fan-favorite character Stuart Minkus, played by Lee Norris, who mainly appeared in the first season and then returned for a guest appearance during season 5.
“There was so much comedy to be mined there and the relationship between the four of them as a group, as a friend group,” Friedle said of the dynamic between Fishel, Strong, Norris and Savage’s characters. “I think they missed an awful lot of funny by getting rid of Lee.”
Friedle also noted he would’ve kept another beloved actor around longer, Anthony Tyler Quinn, who played Jonathan Turner from 1994 until 1997. “But I think if I had to keep only one [actor], I’d have to be keeping Lee on,” he confessed.
Strong agreed, praising Norris’ acting chops, but he opined that if Quinn had been kept on the show past the fourth season, the following seasons would have felt “more grounded.” Quinn ultimately reunited with the cast for Girl Meets World.
