Eric Matthews was the big brother we all wanted to have and sometimes felt that we did. However, as we watch reruns we may notice that Eric progressively becomes less cool, more crazy, and definitely dumber.
In the first two seasons of BMW, Eric was the cool older brother. He had nice hair and always dated pretty girls. He picked on Cory and hated being seen with his parents. He was very sarcastic and witty. Cory could go to him for advice about girls and Eric would usually help. He knew a lot about girls and was quite charming. We never really knew much about how he was doing in school because we only saw him in the kitchen and the living room at the Matthews house. Sometimes came up with really dumb schemes but he was still cool and still relatively smart.
At this point in the series, he was a lot more goofy but still a ladies man. He wants to be a weather man. As the season goes on he makes himself seem more and more absentminded.
He gets an internship at the local TV station. The station allows him to become fill in weather man and he tries to give up on school to pursue his dream. He learns that he needs to go to school and pull up his grades so he can work towards his dreams later on.
At the close of the season Eric becomes devastated when he does not get into the college he wanted and he spends the summer on a road trip with Cory. He proves himself to be a thoughtful brother and a kind person at heart.
In seasons four and five Eric loses some of the cool older brother qualities he once had, he is unmotivated and slacking off in most parts of his life. At the end of the fourth season he finally shows that he is mature and loves Cory. There are also other small signs of maturity like when he dates an older woman and helps take care of her son. For the most part, he just gets himself into a lot of sticky situations with his goofy schemes and lack of common sense. In the first few seasons he seemed to have a lot more common sense. When he moves in with Jack, Jack questions Eric's sanity because of his obsession with Mr. Feeny (which got worse and worse with each season). Eric ends up in Hollywood after his stint in a college play, one of the only other times we see him use any wisdom he has left. He yells at the lead character of his show for being a snob and ends up back in Philly. Throughout these two seasons he is goofy and dumb but has some older brother qualities that make him lovable. He occasionally gives good advice and still maintains a certain amount of wisdom about life.
In the sixth and seventh season it seems that Eric is the annoying goofball who has a good heart but never really does anything right. He seems to have lost any maturity he gained in previous seasons. He does not know how to be in a relationship with a woman and makes a fool of himself on more than one occasion trying to get Rachel to fall in love with him. The ladies man Eric we knew is gone forever. A clueless idiot is pretty much all that remains. Not to mention he seems to be more naive about life than ever. His behavior is more and more creepy in the final season up until the "Plays with Squirrels" where we see a future glimpse of how he could end up.
The deterioration of his "cool guy" image never ceases to amaze me. He is the older brother that Cory and Shawn look up to for most of the first few seasons but after he moves into college he takes a dive into stupidity. I think the best example of this is when Cory tells him he is the best man and we see all of the things that go wrong because of him. It upsets me that they had to dumb down a character that I loved so much. Eric was sarcastic and a little cruel but he always helped out his brother when he needed to. He said stupid things and struggled in school, but the older he got the dumber he became. He was still lovable when his IQ dropped but he was an entirely new character. I will never understand how the character was more mature and experienced at sixteen than he was after graduating college.
Favorite Eric line: "So I said to myself, I said.. Kyle." Alan:"Kyle?" Eric: "That's what I call myself."
Alas, Eric wasn't always stupid. It took him seven seasons to become "Plays with Squirrels".