Here Lies A Minkus
The season one cast photo for Boy Meets World has all of our favorite characters. There's the five members of the Matthews family, the Hunter boy young Cory is so fond of, what's his first name? Shawn? and local hard-ass teacher Mr. Feeny. But who's that dork?
Why, that's Minkus! He was in every episode of the show's first season, had a cameo in the season five finale and then never showed up again. There are 158 episodes of Boy Meets World and Minkus appears in 23 of them.
Family Matters famously began as a spin-off of Perfect Strangers, starring Jo Marie Payton's Harriette Winslow, before Jaleel White came screeching along as horny nerd Steve Urkel. By the show's end, Payton was gone and White was the big star. My easy guess is that Boy Meets World, premiering four years after Family Matters, wanted its own Urkel and put Lee Norris' Stuart Minkus in the main cast in the hope he'd take off. He didn't. Norris left the Boy Meets World universe without so much as a talking Minkus doll to his name.
It feels like the writers didn't know what to do with Minkus beyond having main characters Cory and Shawn feel disgusted by his presence. In the second-to-last episode of his season, Minkus branches out in an unexpected way and gets really into playing Hamlet in a class production. It feels like everybody giving the character one last shot before Minkus would be written out and Boy Meets World would become a reverse-Family Matters.
Minkus' spot in the cast would slowly be taken by Topanga, who begins season one as a hippie nerd. The writers hate her. Every time she talks, your reaction is supposed to be "Shut UP, Topanga." I think about the creators of Recess saying they used their new age-y hippie teacher to voice their own opinions directly because they knew they'd need to use a character you weren't supposed to take seriously if you wanted to comment on gender roles and US history at all in a Disney cartoon on network TV. And the Recess people really respected this character as a part of themselves they didn't want to give up. And the Topanga character here says a lot of that same stuff but the writers of Boy Meets World wish she would fucking die.
It's always fun to see what a long-running series thought it would be, or experimented with being, before the mold set. Minkus is thrown out just as quickly as Cory's two early catchphrases, "What are you, new?" and "I'm [fake superhero name] Boy!" Eric begins the series as an intelligent ladies' man and ends it an idiot weirdo. Cory's little sister Morgan disappears partway through the second season and re-emerges a few episodes later with a different personality, played by a different actor.
You'd need to make these changes if you were putting Boy Meets World together. I'm not saying Minkus had to die, but the premise of this show is "There is a family" and that isn't much to distinguish yourself with. You're going to need to try to get some hooks and you're probably going to need to let those hooks go when you don't know how to use them. Minkus lasted longer than any of the kids who occupied the "Third Friend" role in Cory and Shawn's group, but he, too had to cycle out.
If the show's premise was "there is a family," it eventually became "seven years in the lives of young friends." Boy Meets World had a young principle cast and lucked into a seven season run, which was not as rare for a sitcom in the 90s as it is now, but still made the show a bit of a novelty. Growing Pains and Step by Step, which both also lasted seven seasons, focused on the family as an ensemble and Home Improvement, which lasted eight, was primarily focused on the parents. Saved by the Bell followed most of its cast to college in a spin-off, but that lasted one season and was replaced by the much longer running semi-reboot, Saved by the Bell: The New Class.
By sticking so close to Cory Matthews' adventures while keeping most of its supporting cast around for the long haul, Boy Meets World covered a sixth grade kid growing up, falling in love with a girl he'd eventually marry, going to college and becoming a dad. Sabrina (the teenage witch) grew up and went to college, but she didn't marry a character who'd been around since the first season and she wasn't deeply enmeshed in her best (human) friend's . The show fudges the numbers a bit– in a season two episode, Topanga says "Cory, we've known each other since we were three" even though we saw them meet each other in the sixth grade"– but the reality of the actors aging can't be faked. Boy Meets World is not a funny or even good show, but it's a little like Boyhood the series for how well it kept a group of kids together long enough to watch them become adults.
But not Minkus. In the credits of one episode, Minkus figures out a formula that lets him travel through time. At the end of the first season, Cory and Shawn "zap" Minkus and he blinks out of existence. Given TV's other nerd was visiting pirates and transforming into Stefan Urquelle, these feel like the Boy Meets World writers nudging toward that kind of continuity-free sci-fi nonsense.
This was not the path they chose. The show instead stuck with bland lessons about bullying and explorations of racism that were so forced they felt racist.
I think the Boy Meets World writers were a little too confident in their work. Watching a show deliver three good jokes over two seasons, I was struck by how serious it took itself. This is a comedy so broad it's almost surprising each character doesn't split their pants every episode, but it's also a show where the dad, a grocery store manager, talks seriously about paths not taken and his frustration over salary cuts. In what I assume was a move meant to keep the character on screen more, Cory's brother Eric doesn't go to college. He lives at home and feels intense shame over it. He gets on an episode of MTV's Singled Out by lying about being in college. As the show moves away from its Minkus years, it tries to get more mature. And then somebody will make the dumbest joke you've ever heard and everything will reset for a few episodes. But it never tries to be weird again. I mean, it is weird. The lesson in one episode is "Never go out on a date with a girl if you don't already know her well." But it never Minkuses out again.
The characters would continue to age after Boy Meets World's cancelation. When Girl Meets World premiered in 2014, it followed Cory and Topanga's daughter. Wikipedia says all the old characters showed up again. Even Minkus. But it doesn't seem like he was "temporarily travel through time" Minkus.
Did the show lose something by abandoning its goofiest character? Did pivoting away from its screeching dork hurt Boy Meets World in the long run? Of course not. It's a terrible show. Nothing could have saved it.