When Jabari Banks first learned of auditions taking place for the lead role in Bel-Air, a dark reimagining of his favourite 90s sitcom, he heard his destiny calling. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m perfect for this!’ I knew at that moment: this has got to be me.”
At the time, Banks was just 23 and still a musical theatre student who had never starred in anything, but what he lacked in work experience he made up for in relevant life experience. Banks is a talented rapper who knows his way around the basketball court and, like the song says, he’s “West Philadelphia born and raised”. In other words, he has a lot in common with the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith, who was a 21-year-old rapper in 1990 when his own life got, in the words of the show’s theme tune, flipped-turned upside down.
It started as a chance meeting with TV producer Benny Medina and within six weeks, Smith had relocated cross-country, co-written a brilliantly catchy theme tune with the legendary Quincy Jones (another of the show’s execs) and was on set filming the first episode. The sitcom’s premise was based on Medina’s own teenage experience of moving in with a rich white family in Beverly Hills, after growing up poor in South LA, but it also mirrored Smith’s own Philly-street-to-LA-stardom journey. Thirty years later, the life-imitating-art-imitating-life cycle continues, says Banks: “My life parallels Will’s life in the show so specifically, it’s really crazy. To be in front of the camera, and to play on this level is so beautiful.”
The first episode of Bel-Air features Banks’ character Will enjoying a slower, more reflective version of the “Yo, homes, smell ya later” cab ride depicted in the sitcom’s opening credits. Shooting the part where Will steps out of the cab to gather his thoughts and enjoy the view was surreal: “I’m sitting there on Mulholland Drive and Will, the character, is looking out; but that’s Jabari’s first time on Mulholland Drive too, y’know?”
When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted in September 1990, it met an audience already familiar with, and enthusiastic about, Black sitcoms. The Cosby Show, depicting an upper-middle class doctor’s family in Brooklyn had been on air since 1984 and its slightly edgier spin-off, A Different World, about students at a historically Black college in Virginia, had run from 1987. In the UK, Desmond’s, starring Norman Beaton as the grumpy-gregarious proprietor of a Peckham barbershop, was already a flagship show among Channel 4’s proudly multicultural output. Yet The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air still felt fresh, and has remained so in the decades since, through re-runs and into the streaming era: “I wasn’t even born before it was off the air,” says Banks. “My family had this six-series boxset that would be on repeat in my home. So I definitely caught all the episodes, for sure … This show basically raised me.”
Many others share that abiding affection. The show’s theme tune has become a karaoke standard among millennials, and the teary televised reunion in 2020 was warmly received by a lockdown audience eager for nostalgic comfort-viewing. Even before then, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was present enough in the ether to inspire the creativity of Morgan Cooper, a 27-year-old filmmaker from Kansas City. He created Bel-Air, a four-minute fan film, in the form of a trailer for an imagined reboot and uploaded it to YouTube in March 2019, where it has racked up 7.2m views. Among those viewers was Will Smith – now a 50-year-old movie star and father of three with a mansion of his own. Uncle Phil would be proud.
In his new guise of Hollywood mogul, Smith helped usher a real show into existence, with Cooper on board as a co-executive producer and director. Their first major challenge was to find a lead: “We needed a unicorn, because that’s exactly who Will was in the original,” says Cooper. “We needed a young man who had the charm, the charisma, and [who was] able to give you dramatic performances while still having great comedic timing.” Auditions were held nationwide, but it just so happens their unicorn shared Smith’s hometown. “I remember meeting Jabari in Philly and within five minutes, I knew he was our Will.”
Bel-Air’s other characters and premise have also stuck close to their model, but the episodes have lengthened, from sitcom-standard 22 mins to encompass a widening perspective. Banks summarises this as “if all of the characters from the original wrote in a diary, and we got to open up that diary and dive deep into their feelings”. That tone is matched by a visual style that translates the royal reference of the title into Pan-Africanist imagery, reminiscent of Beyoncé’s Black Is King 2020 visual album, all rendered in a refined palette of teal and grey. Sadly, that means no backwards caps or 90s neons for this generation’s Will. It would be too obviously retro. “We’ve been asking ourselves, how do we recreate that style, but for now,” says Banks, before adding more hopefully, “and, y’know, maybe it’d be a good Halloween costume for me, for next year?”
Another thing that hasn’t changed too much is the subject matter. Cooper believes there’s still much progress to be made in terms of Black representation on TV. “There are so many Black stories that still need to be told,” he says. “In Bel-Air, we see Black people from different places and with different perspectives having uncomfortable conversations with each other. I think that discourse is incredibly important.” In fact, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was always about expanding the narrow on-screen depiction of Blackness. Medina’s real-life adoptive family had been white, but he made the TV version Black because, as he explained to Ebony magazine in 1991: “That way we could explore Black-on-Black prejudice as well as Black class differences.”
The writers of the sitcom were mostly white, as was standard in the industry at the time, but the cast felt their voices were heard. Script changes were made “whenever we would come across moments that they wrote, that was like, ‘This wouldn’t happen … Black people don’t do this,’” said original Carlton actor, Alfonso Ribeiro in the reunion special. “[That] was what made this show special, because we made sure that we were authentic every episode.”
OG fans and recent re-watchers may remember the show’s frequent moments of political engagement, such as Aunt Viv’s reaction to Will’s Malcom X T-shirt in season one – “You can wear the T-shirt, you can put up the posters … but unless you know all the history behind it, you’re trivialising the entire struggle.” Or the time when Jazzy Jeff refused to lower his hands to testify in court: “Dude’s got a gun. Next thing you know I got six warning shots in my back.”
So it is testament to the sitcom’s legacy that Bel-Air has room to go further still. For instance, while it’s easy to imagine the Bel-Air scene in which Carlton (Olly Sholotan) and Will fall out over the N-word appearing in the 90s show, it’s harder to imagine how they could have mined the same emotional depths back then, without being cut short by a punchline or a move to commercial break.
Then there are the subtle but significant shifts in characterisation. In the 90s, the wider Black diaspora was represented by Geoffrey, a Jeeves to Will’s Wooster, played – very properly indeed – by the Saint Lucia-born, Surrey-residing Joseph Marcell. Now Geoffrey is played by Jimmy Akingbola. He’s no longer posh, but still a commanding presence, as a smart-casual, iPad-wielding “house manager”. Akingbola’s depiction of Black British masculinity is one that would not have made sense to US audiences, prior to Idris Elba and Daniel Kaluuya reaching the heights of Hollywood’s A-list.
“Woo! He’s cold isn’t he?” agrees Banks, with an admiring chuckle. “And you know what? Jimmy’s been so adamant and so meticulous to depict the Black British experience differently than that perception from an American standpoint, which is that all British people speak the Queen’s English.”
Bel-Air is in many ways a faithful heir to the Fresh Prince’s throne, but the kingdom all around is changing. Now social media exists to pick up what the show puts down, and Banks is already eagerly anticipating what comes next: “I know Black Twitter’s going to take to it, and that’s the thing we need to do, that’s how we move forward as society; we need to start having difficult conversations.”
Bel-Air will be on Peacock from 14 February on Sky and NOW
