Will Friedle Interview

Show me a kid who grew up in the 90s who didn’t look forward to hovering around a 23-inch standard definition television (sans soundbar) to watch two straight hours of ABC’s Friday night TGIF programming, and I’ll show you either a liar, someone with repressed memories, or the involvement of incredibly unfun parents.

Family Matters, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Step by Step, and, of course, the best of them all, Boy Meets World were the way for a pre-teen/early-teen to kick off the weekend. This was the last generation of appointment television. No DVRs; streaming services were science fiction; everyone watched one episode of a show at the same time and then gathered around the school bus stop to talk about it the next weekday. What a weird time to be alive!

Fast forward to 2023: Long gone are the days of appointment television (RIP, TGIF!) Now, podcasts are all the rage!

It only makes sense that three stars from Boy Meets World, Will Friedle (Eric Matthews), Rider Strong (Shawn Hunter), and Danielle Fishel (Topanga Lawrence) have joined forces for a marathon podcast series, aptly titled POD MEETS WORLD.

The podcast features the three cast members breaking down every episode (yes, all seven seasons) one by one as they revisit their memories of growing up on the Boy Meets World set and rewatching the show through the eyes of folks in their 40s.

In addition to the podcast, the three amigos are taking the show on the road with a unique tour that will stop at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square on Friday, October 13! (COMPLETE SHOW AND TICKET INFORMATION)

Checking in with CleveRock via ZOOM one week ahead of the upcoming Cleveland shindig, Friedle dished on the conception of the podcast.

“We were doing all these conventions together, as a cast, and the conversations, especially between Rider and Danielle and I, we’re just getting more and more in-depth, and we kept talking about how we grew up on the set and what it was like,” he said. “Then it came out that Rider had never actually seen the show.”

NEVER? NEVER SEEN THE SHOW? HMM. INTERESTING!

Strong wasn’t the only cast member who was self-deprived of the joys of Boy Meets World.

“I watched some of the first season and then I got really self-conscious about watching myself on camera,” Friedele admitted. “I just stopped watching.”

Naturally, there was only one way to remedy the situation….

“Let’s go back and rewatch it and see if anybody would join us on the journey,” Friedele explained. “It was actually Rider’s idea, but we don’t like to give him credit. We like to give everybody else credit BUT Rider. But in actuality, it was Rider. He came up with the idea, and we took meetings about it in 2018 before all the rewatch podcast stuff had really exploded and nobody knew how to do it, including us. They were asking questions. ‘Are you going to watch it while you’re talking about it?’ And, we really couldn’t answer. We had no idea. It went nowhere because we couldn’t answer the questions. Then, the rewatch podcast thing kind of started and we ended up being able to take other meetings and people said, ‘Hey, we know what we’re doing now, so yeah, let’s go watch the show together!’ And that’s what we did.“

Who has ever tried to rewatch an entire television series from start to finish and failed? What sounds like a fun and easy task can sometimes turn into a chore. The goal of POD MEETS WORLD is to break down every single episode. That’s seven seasons. 158 episode! How confident is the gang that they will make it to the finish line?

“One hundred percent,” Freidele exclaimed. “We are one hundred percent confident! We are about halfway through season three and kind of hitting our stride as actors on the show. It’s getting better for us. Parts of it, for our own performances for ourselves, have been a little cringey for us. There were times when we were young actors that we were trying to find ourselves. We had to do it on camera. Some of our best moments, which are some of our worst moments as actors, are caught for everybody to see. We’re watching our progression not only as people, not only as friends but also as actors. It’s certainly been interesting!”

“Cringey.” The vast majority would describe their formative years that way. This interviewer, born in 1983, is grateful for the lack of readily accessible portable technology to capture video of every moment that is all too prevalent today. Freidle was asked if the fact that the show was filmed during the awkward years contributed to his decision not to watch the show until now.

“That’s a good question. I think we were so close to it. We spent seven years of our life and in our childhood doing this,” he answered. “I was the oldest younger actor on the show, and I was 16 when we started. So Ben [Savage] was 11, and Danielle was 12. I think Rider was 12 or 13. The idea is that some of arguably your most awkward years are when you’re not really a kid and not really an adult; it’s kind of those middle years. The fact that those are caught on film for us, I think made it a little strange for us to go back and watch. Any other time when you’re really growing up and trying to find your next chapter in life, when we got away from it, we didn’t want to revisit it right away. The joy is now that we’re all in our forties, we can go back and we can hopefully more objectively watch what we did as kids. It’s strange. It’s like watching home movies every week with your friends that you grew up with and it’s all just kind of caught there on tape. I think we needed the break, frankly, before we went back and really were able to remove ourselves enough to really critique the show.”