Everyone loves watching their favorite sitcom characters dress up for a night of mischief — but the best Halloween episodes are the ones that dare to think outside the box.
Boy Meets World’s “And Then There Was Shawn” fits that mold. The season 5 episode, which aired in February 1998, was directed by Jeff McCracken and written by Jeff Menell and marked a creative change in direction for the typically formulated family comedy series.
The story follows the aftermath of Cory (Ben Savage) and Topanga’s (Danielle Fishel) breakup, which leaves their best friend, Shawn (Rider Strong), reeling. When a spat about a pencil with classmate Kenny (Richard Lee Jackson) escalates, the trio — along with Angela (Trina McGee), Eric (Will Friedle), Jack (Matthew Lawrence) and Mr. Feeny (William Daniels) — find themselves locked inside the school after a day of detention with a killer on the loose.
With genuine jump scares, bloody deaths and endless references to ‘90s horror flicks, “And Then There Was Shawn” took Boy Meets World to a place no other network sitcom had gone before.
“I remember thinking it was the most bonkers thing in the world,” Strong told Entertainment Weekly in August 2022, noting that while the show had done a “few episodes that went kind of crazy” — like their crossover with Sabrina the Teenage Witch — he was never a fan of “breaking the rules” of the show’s structure until reading the script for “And Then There Was Shawn.”
“I remember loving this one from the get-go. We just thought it was hysterical,” he said. “I’m a huge fan of horror films. I was a fan of Scream and the revival of horror films that was going on at that moment. So I just remember loving it.”
Something else the episode had those other sitcoms didn’t? A cameo by Friedle’s then-girlfriend, Jennifer Love Hewitt, who had recently starred in horror blockbuster I Know What You Did Last Summer.
“Love and I had been dating for a while by that point,” Friedle explained to EW about how her role came about. “I think that was a year and a half or two years into our relationship. I know [cocreator] Michael Jacobs wanted to have somebody from the horror franchises. … So he asked me if I would ask her if she would be on the show. We were very close at the time, so she knew everybody on the cast, obviously, and everybody knew her well, so it seemed like a good fit.”
While the actual killer turns out to be (spoiler alert!) Shawn himself — a reveal the cast felt was slightly too “cheesy” of an explanation to fit into the episode’s spookier narrative — Strong, Friedle and Fishel still remember the experience as their “best” time on set during Boy Meets World’s run. McCracken, however, may have had a different experience as director.
“Directorially, this episode was a disaster for Jeff. He was so unhappy with us,” Strong quipped. “It’s very hard to do single-camera jokes and effects with a multi-camera crew. He clearly was trying to do specific shots and specific homages and weird little tilts, and I think it was just a nightmare. We did not help by constantly making each other laugh and not taking the job seriously. I think it was a really tough episode for Jeff.”
Keep scrolling for your guide to the best Halloween sitcoms of all time:
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