Jacobs

I mentioned in my post last week that Michael Jacobs, creator of family shows like Boy Meets World, My Two Dads and The Torkelsons among others, was very highly regarded by many of his longtime writers. Rider Strong, who played Shawn on Boy Meets World (and most recently co-created this Obama campaign video for Moveon.org’s “Obama in 30 Seconds” contest) had some comments on the post and with his permission I’m reprinting part of them here, as a reminder of the obvious: while kid- or family-oriented shows have different rules and restrictions from “grown-up” shows, a good producer will take as much trouble with it as with any other kind of show:

This is mostly an excuse for me to talk about the only show that successfully imitated Friends. You may remember how in the mid-to-late ’90s, the networks were clogged with Friends clones and shows that retooled themselves to be more like Friends. The glut of wanna-be Friends nearly killed off the multi-camera sitcom. But what most of us didn’t notice at the time was that there was one show, and probably only one, that patterned itself after Friends. And that was Boy Meets World. Yeah, Fred Savage’s brother, Topanga, Boy Meets World. Let me explain:

After I wrote the post yesterday about Bob Boyett, I discovered that Jeremy Irons and Joan Allen have signed to be in a new Broadway play by Michael Jacobs. Michael Jacobs is the creator of Charles in Charge (though he left before it got really bad), My Two Dads, Dinosaurs and Boy Meets World. We are seriously two steps away from seeing a trend emerge here, as Broadway becomes more and more a haven for refugees from TGIF. But anyway, as news stories often do, this gives me an excuse to talk about something tangential.