A beloved part of ABC’s legendary TGIF sitcom lineup, “Boy Meets World” ran for seven hit seasons.
Amid all that apparent success, star Danielle Fishel is now revealing that contract negotiations early in the series 1993-2000 run almost saw her quit the show.
Danielle Fishel Was ‘Nervous’ During the Negotiations
Fishel recently teamed up with “Boy Meets World” co-stars Will Friedle and Rider Strong to author their new book, “Book Meets World: The Definitive Inside Story of the Hit Sitcom ‘Boy Meets World,'” detailing many behind-the-scenes moments about which viewers of the show were completely unaware.
One of these involved the difficult contract negotiations that took place between the show’s second and third seasons.
In an excerpt from the book appearing in People, Fishel — who played Topanga Lawrence on the show — claims that the offer only guaranteed she’d appear in 13 of the third season’s 23 episodes. And while the proposed contract gave her the freedom to audition for other roles, she was advised against doing so, told it “would be a bad look.”
Her father advised her to use leverage, telling her to threaten not so show up until she was presented with an offer considered more fair.
This, she recalled, placed her in a difficult situation. “I was sobbing. ‘I have to go. You’re gonna lose this job for me.’ They would say, ‘This is what you should be getting. This is where we’re at. And the only way to get it is if they know that you’re serious about not coming back unless you get treated fairly,’” she wrote.
“I was very nervous I was going to lose my job,” Fishel admitted.
As she recalled, those contract talks dragged on until the last minute, at which point star Ben Savage intervened on Fishel’s behalf.
“The negotiations were down to the wire and ultimately, Savage got Fishel’s rate doubled, increasing it to $15,000 an episode for Season 3,” the book notes.
Rider Strong Felt ‘Screwed’ By His Contract
The book reveals that Fishel wasn’t the only member of the cast to experience hardball tactics when negotiating a new contract.
Strong — who played Shawn Hunter — writes about his experience leading up to the series’ final season, admitting he initially “misread” his contract at the time.
“I had my own relationship with my manager, my own relationship with my agent, which is why I walked into a meeting with Michael [Jacobs, the show’s creator] by myself and got completely screwed,” Strong wrote, via Entertainment Weekly, explaining that he would have preferred that he’d “finished the sixth season, which I was contracted to do, and then I would have gotten the hell out of there.”
As Strong pointed out, “I was already in college, and I didn’t want to do the show anymore.” However, Jacobs insisted that his remaining would be “good for the show,” convincing Strong that he could return to college the following year.
As Strong explained, his mistaken belief that he was already contractually committed to a seventh season when he actually wasn’t likely cost him a significant chunk of change. Looking back, he now sees that if he’d threatened to walk when his contact actually had expired he could have been paid more.
Savage, on the other hand, “held out” before agreeing to another season, with led him to receive a “huge pay increase,” Strong wrote in the book.
“There was a lot of miscommunication,” he admitted. “If we had actually talked to each other, we probably should have just said, ‘We’re all equal here, let’s go [negotiate together].’ But there was no sense of that. It seemed that Ben getting into Stanford was his biggest negotiating tactic, because the contract ended. They wanted the seventh season, but he was like, ‘Are you going to not allow me to go to college?’ He stuck to his guns, and it worked out.”
Danielle Fishel Nearly Quit ‘Boy Meets World’ During Tense Contract Negotiations