Rider Strong Recounts ‘Girl Meets World’ Storyline That ‘Genuinely Disturbed’ Him

An episode of the Disney Channel tween comedy Girl Meets World taught all the wrong lessons, according to Rider Strong.

The actor, who starred on Shawn Hunter Boy Meets World, reflected on that moment on the podcast Pod Meets World as he and former co-stars and current podcast hosts Danielle Fishel and Will Friedle revisited episodes of the spinoff.

As they related in Thursday’s episode of that podcast, Girl Meets World Season 1, Episode 2, “Girl Meets Boy,” shows former Boy Meets World protagonist Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) ordering middle-schooler Maya Hart (Sabrina Carpenter) to spy on his daughter, Riley (Rowan Blanchard). Cory, who’s a history teacher at John Quincy Adams Middle School in Girl Meets World, also gives Maya a cell phone so she can report back to him.

“This is so inappropriate,” Strong, who has one child with wife Alexandra Barreto, said on the podcast. “I just think it’s so creepy. There’s this very simple rule. If an adult asks you to keep a secret — you know, I told my son that, it’s a very basic parenting thing — like, if any adult asks you to keep a secret, don’t trust that person or come tell me.”

He went on: “And here is the teacher asking her to keep a secret, and that secret is to keep an eye on his daughter. And he’s giving her a phone, which is anti-everything that he’s been this entire time and not in a funny way. Like, in a really horrible way.”

Strong, who recurred on Girl Meets World, was also astonished that Disney Channel gave the OK to that spying storyline. “Like, you know, I get the joke of like, oh, he learned the lesson. He learned the wrong lesson,” he said. “But it’s not cool. I was genuinely disturbed by this. … I can’t believe this got through because it’s truly a weird message.”