Episode 5x19 "Eric Hollywood"

We're making up for the complete lack of Eric in the previous episode. Thank goodness.

Eric's working construction for Pennbrook's drama department. He's just built a balcony for their production of Romeo and Juliet, but when the guy playing Romeo tests it out, it breaks apart and he literally dies. He is actually dead. Some guys carry him off on a stretcher. That's a refreshingly dark sense of humor. I like it. And you know, this is no one's fault except the people who hired Eric. So how can we fix this problem?

Eric does a few lines from the play with a surprising level of skill. Apparently he's picked up the entire play word for word in the time he's been working here. Yeah well your little brother peed on a cop car last episode, Eric, so maybe you're spending too much time here. Anyway we skip ahead to the production of R+J, it's the scene were Romeo confronts Tybalt after he killed Mercutio. Jack is playing Tybalt because they didn't want to pay any more actors for this episode. So yeah Eric gets through the whole thing without screwing up. I almost don't believe it.

The next morning, Eric finds his parents and little sister looking at all the great reviews of his performance in various newspapers. And Eric's head grew three sizes that day.

Meanwhile, at The Apartment, Topanga shows up to make sure she and Shawn are still on good terms, now that she's broken up with Cory. Shawn insists that they are, which is very mature, but this is all just a setup for the side story. Topanga notices that Jack has chicken pox, and soon finds them on Shawn as well. We can look back at two other Eric-centric episodes, "By Hook or By Crook" in season 2, in which Cory has contracted mono, and "Singled Out" in season 4, when Cory had to have his tonsils taken out. And now chicken pox on the Hunter boys. Why do people start having medical problems whenever Eric gets a story?

Eric wraps up another performance, to the praise of his parents and Feeny. I think it's adorable that Mister Feeny came to see Eric in the play. Some other folks are here to see Eric as well. One from Juilliard, one from the Royal Shakespeare Company, aaaaaaaand one from ABC. Naturally, Eric wants to be on TV, so he chooses the third option.

There's a little montage of Feeny and Eric driving a golf cart around some Hollywood lots, and finally we arrive at the set of Kid Gets Acquainted With The Universe. Yes, it's time for Boy Meets World to parody itself. The first example is Lindsay Ridgeway, the actress who plays Morgan, driving up in her golf cart and being very rude and abrasive and anti-Morgan. This is actually some of her best delivery we've ever seen.

Meanwhile in Chickenpoxville, Jack is delirious. In his delirium the thought-to-speech filter is completely turned off. He explains in his loopy-voice that Shawn doesn't want Topanga here since she broke up with Cory, which must mean that Shawn and Topanga were never actually friends. From my perspective, that's true, and is an interesting plot point to explore. Shawn and Topanga would never hang out without Cory. On the other hand, at the beginning of 5x16, Shawn says, and I quote, "You're my friend Topanga. You're one of the two best people I know." He had an agenda when he said that though, so I'm going to conclude that he was lying. Also Shawn's wearing that one shirt that someone pointed out at the beginning of the season, they called it an "ohm shirt", and we were gonna keep track. It's the first time I've seen it since then.

Time to kick the meta jokes into high gear back in Hollywood. Eric meets the rest of the cast of this show, where he'll be playing the "long lost brother". It's the same cast as Boy Meets World, and each of the actors is being the opposite of their Boy Meets World character. Ben Savage is Ben Sandwich, brother of Bread Sandwich from "that show", since his real brother, Fred Savage, was of course famous for The Wonder Years. Ben Sandwich is very aggressive and angry, literally every line he says is hysterical.

It's hard to say whether that's a jab at the fact that Eric is historically a more interesting character than Cory, but I like to think that it is. Funny either way. Ben's entire demeanor and attitude is just amazing, he's so good at this tongue-in-cheek stuff.

Rider Strong is Schneider, a very shy, awkward, anti-Shawn guy, and honestly, this one kinda misses the mark for me. The audience is much more entertained by it than I am. We don't get a name for Danielle Fischel's character, but it follows the same trend. She's ditzy and flirty and handsy, and... yeah you know what I'm getting at. This one works much better than Schneider. It's actually a lot of fun to see Fischel doing something other than Topanga's boringness.

Time for Matthew Lawrence. I put him at second place on the hilarity-meter, behind Ben. His gag is that he doesn't understand why they would want Eric on the show when they already have him. This is a reversal of Jack's introduction when there didn't really seem to be a reason for him. That's something that I and most of the commenters talked about at length, so it really is fantastic here that they're making fun of it. I genuinely appreciate this joke in every way.

Then we go over to Mister Feeny (the real Mister Feeny) wondering why the classroom set only has nine desks. The director, whose name is Matt Fraser, assures Feeny that camera angles will be used to make the classroom appear to have many more students. So, again, just another example of the show picking fun at itself. I don't know if the director's name is supposed to be a joke, it doesn't sounds like "Michael Jacobs", and I can't find any prominent employees at ABC with that name, so I dunno.

It's time to read some lines, and Ben's giving Schneider a hard time. "I am so sick and tired of carrying this show," the audience doesn't laugh at that, but it cracks me up. This might be the funniest I have ever seen Ben Savage. I love every single line, the audience isn't laughing nearly as much as they should be. The scene they're reading for has Schneider's character, Shane, trying to convince Ben's character, Rory, to steal his dad's car keys and credit card. Immediately, Ben yells at the director for giving them a story they've already done a hundred thousand times. "We're doing this story again?!" It really is one of the best jokes in the series, because it's perfectly self aware. You can absolutely imagine the actors having that reaction in real life, and we've certainly had that reaction as viewers.

Best line in the series? Quite possibly. Ben Sandwich continues his tirade by yelling at the writing staff, who are a bunch of really young kids. These child actors don't know how to say their lines, making it tough to watch, but Ben continues to be hilarious. These kids are all the children of writers and producers of Boy Meets World, so, yeah, nepotism at its finest. The original Morgan was less annoying.

Anyway it's time for Eric to read some lines as Rory's brother Derek. Eric only knows how to do Shakespeare though, and then gets upset at how different Ben Sandwich is on camera, so the whole thing falls apart and Eric gets fired. Feeny gives him a quick lesson about how extremely difficult it is to make it in the acting business, that you'll get ten thousand rejections before a "yes", which is certainly a valuable lesson for aspiring actors, and artists in general.

Back in Philly, Topanga returns and her and Shawn make up and are friends again. But that's really not even remotely interesting. During the credits, we see Eric looking for his lucky tube socks, and Cory admits that he shrunk them in the wash, saying "I don't think they're so lucky anymore." But that wasn't in the script, so Will Friedle "breaks character" and flips out at Ben Savage for improvising, and then storms off. It's supposed to be the same kind of behind-the-scenes joke that we saw at the set of Kid Gets Acquainted With The Universe, except this time it's the actual Boy Meets World characters and actors. It's pretty damn amazing.

This was another joke episode, so there's no point in scoring it, but it definitely deserves a full score, A+, ten out of ten. This is absolutely one of the funniest and most fun episodes of the series. If not top 5, certainly top 10. I laughed from beginning to end. Love it. Granted, you do have to be pretty familiar with the show to get all of the meta humor, but if that's the case (as it is for all of us) then it's a fantastic ride. You can't miss this one.

As I've written this blog over the last year, there have been many times where I wanted to criticize this show for something obvious, but I didn't. What stopped me was this episode. This episode shows us that they're very well aware of the silly things they do on the show, especially that "and still be so stupid?!" part. Every time I've thought about criticizing that, I remember this episode. So not only is this episode hilarious, but the peek behind the curtain is also very important in the grand scheme of appreciating this show.

Thanks for reading, see you Monday for a garbage episode that I hate.

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