It Only Took an Hour for a Cult to Brainwash Shawn in a Very Special ‘Boy Meets World’ Episode
No, you haven’t been inculcated with false memories by some “self-help” organization: There really was a cult episode of Boy Meets World.
That installment, the punnily-titled “Cult Fiction,” came in the ABC sitcom’s fourth season, and has a never-before-seen John Adams High student named Sherri lure Rider Strong’s Shawn Hunter into a creepy lair called The Centre. And he falls under the spell of this cult in one hour flat.
The role of Sherri went to Popular actor Tamara Mello, but if Boy Meets World producers had their druthers, a famous actor would have played the part …
In the episode, Shawn goes from Centre skeptic to convert in minutes
“Cult Fiction” starts with Shawn’s teacher-turned-guardian Mr. Turner (Anthony Tyler Quinn) giving him a lecture about taking his education and his future seriously, imploring Shawn not to blow off his advice. After Mr. Turner leaves, Sherri pops into the classroom and tells Shawn she heard the whole thing. And what’s more, she has “a hundred people” who would never be so judgmental.
Those hundred people, as it turns out, belong to The Centre, a shady cadre whose members greet Shawn and Sherri by saying their names in unison and lining up to hug them. Sherri introduces Shawn to The Centre’s leader, Mr. Mac (played by Teen Wolf’s Jerry Levine), who invites him to move in.
“Oh, my bad. It’s a cult,” Shawn says.
But after just an hour with the cult, Shawn is a convert. Cory (Ben Savage) finds him spewing Centre-speak. “The length of a journey has nothing to do with its value, Shawn,” the brainwashed teen tells Cory, forgetting to change the name in the mantra he’s parroting.
Cory tries to talk Shawn out of staying in The Centre. As does Mr. Hunter. As does Mr. Feeny (William Daniels), who has been trying to take The Centre down for some time. Mr. Matthews (William Russ), Cory’s dad, even suggests tying Shawn up to prevent him from returning to the cult.
Shawn leaves the cult after Mr. Turner nearly dies
It’s not until Mr. Turner gets into a motorcycle wreck that Shawn reaches a turning point. When Mr. Mac shows up at the hospital, Mr. Matthews shoves him against the wall. “I will kill to protect Shawn Hunter from people like you,” the suddenly-violent TV dad tells this Svengali.
Amid the fracas, Cory and Topanga (Danielle Fishel) take Shawn to Mr. Turner’s hospital room, where the badly-injured teacher is lying unconscious. “Turner took care of you,” Cory tells Shawn. “He loves you, and you love him. Is that real? Or are Mr. Mac and The Centre real? You decide.”
And as pensive music fades in, Shawn takes a private moment to talk to Mr. Turner — and to a higher power. “Jon, even when I was at The Centre, it was all the things that you taught me that made me wonder if it was the right place for me or not,” he says. “But you didn’t teach me enough — you, and Cory, and my parents, and the Matthewses, and the handful of people who really care about me — so don’t blow me off, Jon! Don’t blow me off, God! … Don’t take Turner away from me.”
Fortunately, Mr. Turner starts coming to. And even more fortunately, Shawn tells Mr. Mac he’s packing up his things at The Centre to move in with the Matthews family. “If I was an empty person who didn’t have anything to believe in, I might go with you because that would be easy,” he tells the cult leader. “Well, I’m done with easy, and I’m done with empty. I’m done with you.”
Producers wanted Rachael Leigh Cook, Rider Strong’s girlfriend at the time, to play Sherri
In a 2024 episode of Pod Meets World — Strong and Fishel’s podcast with Boy Meets World costar Will Friedle — Strong revealed that producers approached him about their hopes Rachael Leigh Cook, whom Strong was dating at the time, would play Sherri.
“They wanted her to be the girl who entices me into this cult because Rachael was famous at the time [as] a working actress, we were together, [and] she was around a lot,” Strong said. “And she wouldn’t do it.”
Strong’s recollection was that it was Cook’s manager who put the kibosh on the idea, since Cook was getting too famous to guest-star on a kids TV show. “The fact that she didn’t do television was, like, a big thing,” Strong said. “She didn’t have to do television, especially guest-starring on television. And she was a big deal at the time.”
In fact, Strong recalled Cook contemplating — and complaining about — an audition for “this Titanic movie.” (“How many times can they sink this thing?” Cook said, according to Strong.)
“So that’s the world we’re in,” he said. “She’s getting meetings for that, and I’m on Boy Meets World.”
As it turned out, producers cast a Cook lookalike who happened to costar with the real deal. “What’s funny is that I remember [the producers] saying, like, ‘Oh, but we cast a girl who looks like Rachael intentionally,’” Strong said. “Which is so funny because Tamara ended up being in She’s All That with Rachael.”
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July/August 2025
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