Bel-Air Review: A Beloved Comedy Gets a Dark Origin Story
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The Pitch: He got in one little fight, his mom got scared…
When Kansas City filmmaker Morgan Cooper reimagined The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a drama with a teaser trailer in 2019, he tapped into an idea that now seems obvious. Fleeing your hometown to avoid gang violence? Navigating an upper-class, predominantly white environment as a young, working-class Black man, with only your rich, semi-estranged relatives as a support system? The show’s entire premise was rife with opportunities for drama.
While The Fresh Prince never tip-toed around this tension, it did temper it with comedic relief. The very nature of a sitcom — especially in the 1990s — required it. Naturally, then, Cooper’s no-holds-barred trailer went viral, and with the blessing (and executive producing support) of Will Smith, the beloved comedy now has a dramatic companion. In its 2022 iteration, Bel-Air capitalizes on the two things dominating television today: nitty-gritty realism, and nostalgia.
Your Crown is Waiting: Presented in chronological order, faithful to the events of Smith’s famous theme song, Cooper fills in the gaps in the fictional Smith’s origin story with a dramatic flair. Here, Will’s (Jabari Banks) “little” fight isn’t so little: After a basketball game against two drug dealers goes awry, Will pulls a gun, and ends up arrested.
By itself, the violent nature of the arrest — the officers’ demands that Will “stop resisting” prove especially striking in the Black Lives Matter era — heightens the sense of danger permeating Will’s beloved West Philly.
But once Will’s attorney Uncle Phil (Adrian Holmes) calls in some favors to get him out of jail, he becomes an even bigger target. Under the belief that Will snitched on him to achieve clemency, the drug dealers vow to exact revenge. Suddenly, moving across the country doesn’t seem like an overreaction.
Bel-Air (Peacock)
You Didn’t Tell Me Your Family Was White: At its core, The Fresh Prince is a meditation on Blackness. As Will struggles to fit in with the coiffed Banks family, their differing lifestyles pull apart the mythical, singular Black experience, and the conflicts between them demand the characters — and the viewer — to question what sacrifices you should and should not make for success.
As in the sitcom, the dynamic between Will and Carlton (Olly Sholotan), signposts of their respective upbringings, proves the most effective way to navigate these issues. The main difference here, however, is that Carlton is a full-on antagonist to Will, not just a foil.
In Bel-Air, Sholotan nails Alfonso Ribeiro’s smug cadence but is no longer the awkward loser standing in his cousin’s shadow. Instead, he’s a popular lacrosse superstar who rules Bel-Air Academy, and he immediately looks down upon Will’s street mannerisms — even threatening him upon his arrival in LA. By the end of the pilot, it’s hard to imagine the two forging a brotherhood in the same way as the sitcom.
Intensifying the animosity between Will and Carlton is a great way to open up storylines for the show, which it does well. But while the sitcom portrayed Carlton’s “white” interests more as character quirks than something necessarily malicious, in Bel-Air, Carlton’s conservatism — in the name of Black excellence, he insists — comes across as self-hatred more than anything.
For all of his troubling plot points (a Xanax problem, an ex-girlfriend who immediately befriends Will), Carlton’s politics aren’t really explained by the first three episodes of the show. Bel-Air Academy doesn’t seem so stuffy and white as to make his intensity a requisite for popularity, and no one else in the Banks family seems to honor the same stringent traditionalism.
In the sitcom, Carlton modeled his personality off the strong, almost domineering Phil, but here, his father seems relatively progressive (or, at least, he poses as such to aid his bid for Los Angeles District Attorney). Holmes’ portrayal of the character is equally softened. While he doesn’t boast the same scene-commanding stage presence as the late, great James Avery, right away he displays a chemistry with Banks’ Will that makes it easy to see why Carlton quickly grows jealous of the pair’s budding father-son relationship.
Bel-Air (Peacock)
Hilary (Coco Jones) and Aunt Vivian (Cassandra Freeman) butt heads on a similar, albeit smaller scale, a hint at the generational divides present within the Banks family. Fed up with Hilary’s never-ending gap year, Viv scores her daughter, a social media influencer trying to make it as a cook, an interview with a coveted food magazine.
While Hilary impresses the recruiters with her cooking, she’s told to tone down her spicy recipes (“I don’t think your family is our target audience,” the representatives insist, when Hilary says her family loves her flair).
This not-so-subtle racism leads Hilary not only to decline the job, but to trash the magazine to her 75,000 Instagram followers. The mother-daughter fallout that follows presents a common balancing act — self-love versus sacrifice, authenticity versus tact — for all Black folks trying to make it in a system framed against them. There are no easy answers.
The Verdict: Minutes into Bel-Air’s pilot, Will’s mother, Viola (April Parker Jones), gives him a word of encouraging advice: “Your crown is waiting, as soon as you find the courage to wear it.” Combined with the opening sequence’s imagery of Will sitting on a throne, the dramatic play on Smith’s title of The Fresh Prince makes clear that Will is something of a tragic character, an honor-roll student and talented basketball player swept up in the violence of his surroundings.
This heavy-handedness, along with some stiff street slang, tips the show’s hand as it works hard to lay down its expository details. A dramatic interpretation is fine, but Bel-Air would be wise not to take itself too seriously.
With the help of rich, beloved source material, Bel-Air has a lot to work with, and it’s shown no issues in being entertaining. The question, now, is if it can leave The Fresh Prince behind and really say something about the issues it presents. Its crown is waiting, if it can find commentary striking enough to wear it.
Where to Watch: The first three episodes of Bel-Air premiere February 13th on Peacock. Subsequent episodes debut on Thursdays.
Trailer:
Bel-Air Review: A Beloved Comedy Gets a Dark Origin Story
Carys Anderson
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