Entertainment
What If Hannah Horvath Was on 'Girl Meets World'?
The new Disney Channel semi-original series, Girl Meets World , premiered its first trailer this week and unfortunately for Boy Meets World fans, Cory and Topanga are taking the back seat to two tweens, whom I shall refer to as "Blonde One" and "Brunette One." Brunette One appears to be a semi-bad influence on Blonde One, who is chafing under a constant stream of love and support from her parents. Her mother is the owner of a "trendy after-school hangout that specializes in pudding," while her father is the seventh grade science teacher at her school. Blonde One must vacillate between weeping over her parents' career choices and actively thinking of ways to overthrow their coddling influence.
Here's where Girls comes in. Who better than Hannah Horvath to teach Blonde One how to find herself, then lose herself, then stick a q-tip down her ear, then find herself again? Who better than Jessa to take Brunette One under her rebellious and occasionally drugged-out wing? If you, as a viewer, are worried that there won't be enough tension in Girl Meets World to flog the plot along, have no fear: the Girls are here.
Let's imagine what it'd be like if Girls x Girl Meets World.
Each lovely lady, of course, would have a special spot on the show. Marnie, for one, could star as Cory's boss and the principal of the middle school. Occasionally, she leaves the intercom on and the students are subjected to her painfully overwrought singing. When the dreamy music teacher appears, however, Principal Michaels learns to take a chill pill and lean in to her own ambitions. She launches a school-wide talent show. Brunette One and Blonde One put on a charming tap routine, but Principal Michaels, in a fit of vanity, ultimately awards herself first place. Janitor Ray takes her down a peg or two by telling her exactly what he thinks of her, and she relinquishes her trophy to the true winner of the show: a kid who performed Chinese yo-yo tricks to "Sandstorm."
After school, Blonde One comes home to her babysitter: Jessa Johansson. Her parents hired Ms. Johansson out of a mixture of pity and awe, and they hope that their apple pie lifestyle will help her settle down. They didn't check her references, luckily, or they would have known that her last babysitting gigs ended with a botched affair and a botched assisted suicide. Blonde One and Brunette One enjoy Ms. Johansson's company because she dresses them to look like bohemian American Girl dolls, and her advice on boys is always spot on: "Ignore them, unless they're investment bankers or artists." They beg her to take them to a Kesha concert, and she sneaks them backstage to play in Kesha's glitter sandbox. The star is not amused, but Jessa knows the bouncer. The girls escape unscathed, and it takes to wash the glitter out of their hair.
Blonde One and Brunette One are always excited and terrified for their next English class, which is taught by Ms. Horvath. She is either making hilariously on-point comments about the other students, weeping softly under her desk for deciding to not attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop, or awkwardly revealing too much about her past relationships. The girls think they may have seen her in a neon tube top on the subway on a Wednesday night, but they have written it off as a collective fever dream. The great thing about Ms. Horvath is that she is always encouraging them to write, and the not-so-great thing is that she sometimes tells them, "I wouldn't even use this paper for toilet paper," while musing,"I was going to write an eBook. An eBook."
And, because no tween's life is complete without organized dance, Blonde One and Brunette One report weekly to Ms. Shapiro for personal Zumba lessons. They learn that Ms. Shapiro can speak five hundred words per minute, that her favorite carbonated water is mandarin, and that she was one class away from graduating from NYU. She also terrifies them a bit, because she reminds Brunette One of her dog, a shih tzu who contracted rabies and had to be put down. Nonetheless, Ms. Shapiro always encourages them to keep moving. She reminds them, "Oh. My. God. You are totally, like, in the best shape of your lives. I would kill for my tween body back."
Ultimately, Girls could put the "world" in Girl Meets World, as Blonde One and Brunette One interact with their potential future selves. Watching them react to and interact with the characters from Girls would help them be relatable to both the tween audience and the Millennial crowd, while the addition of Girls would cut through the cloying sweetness of Cory, Topanga, and their pudding-and-science careers. I challenge you, HBO and Disney, to collaborate and turn my dream into reality. Television viewers of the United States, I present to you: Girls Meets World.
