TV Talk: ‘Fresh Prince’ becomes ‘Bel-Air’ in dramatic reboot

When director Morgan Cooper’s 2019 trailer for an imagined gritty reboot of the Will Smith-starring ‘90s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” went viral, it was probably for a few reasons.

The homemade trailer looked great and captured all the elements of the sitcom and then turned them into what one might expect Hollywood to do if it made a dramatic version of “Fresh Prince.” You could almost consider Cooper’s trailer a parody of how modern television/streaming outlets approach some reboots.

But Will Smith, who starred in the original sitcom, and the folks at streaming service Peacock didn’t have that reaction seeing as they hired Cooper to make “Bel-Air” reality as a straight-ahead drama, tonally identical to Cooper’s original short.

Streaming on Peacock beginning Super Bowl Sunday, there’s nothing funny about “Bel-Air,” which is essentially a teen soap, albeit with grittier themes and a lot of profanity. It falls somewhere between CW’s “All American,” which essentially already did a dramatic version of “Fresh Prince,” and HBO’s much rougher “Euphoria.”

Cooper created “Bel-Air,” directs the pilot and shares a writing credit on the first episode that introduces West Philadelphia’s Will Smith (Jabari Banks), whose mother, worried after he’s arrested with a gun, sends Will to live with Aunt Viv (Cassandra Freeman) and Uncle Phil (Adrian Holmes) in their Bel Air, Calif., mansion.

The show essentially waves away how Will is able to get out of jail and leave Philly – Uncle Phil “made some calls” – but “Bel-Air” also suggests there will be consequences down the road – Phil is running for Los Angeles district attorney and pulling strings for Will seems destined to trip up his campaign.

The “Bel-Air” pilot is arguably more rough-and-tumble than Cooper’s DIY short but later episodes let a little more sunlight in.

The character of Carlton (Olly Sholotan), Will’s straight-arrow cousin played by Alfonso Ribeiro in the “Fresh Prince” sitcom, gets the most significant makeover. In “Bel-Air,” Carlton’s not just jealous of his hipper cousin, Carlton is almost villainous. (Simone Joy Jones, a 2021 Carnegie Mellon University grad, plays Carlton’s ex-girlfriend, Lisa, who takes an interest in Will.)

The strongest scene in the pilot features Carlton’s white friend quoting a song that uses a racial slur, which Will objects to. Carlton defends his buddy. It’s an interesting controversy to have brought up and to hear both Will’s and Carlton’s points of view, but “Bel-Air” rushes through it to get to the next conflict.

Efforts to remake sitcoms into dramas have a history in TV. Some would argue “M*A*S*H*” morphed from a comedy into a drama in front of viewers’ eyes over the duration of its run, particularly given its two-and-a-half-hour finale.

Perhaps there’s no more notorious example than ‘70s sitcom “The Brady Bunch,” which, following several reboots (“The Brady Bunch Variety Hour,” “The Brady Brides”), made the move into drama with “A Very Brady Christmas” (1988), a TV movie that performed well enough to get 1990’s hour-long drama “The Bradys” (AKA “bradysomething”) greenlit. This drama series – with a substitute Marcia (Leah Ayres replaced Maureen McCormick) — was a creative and ratings bomb that marked the end of scripted Brady fare starring the show’s original cast.

“Bel-Air” isn’t that kind of a disaster by any means. And it probably helps that “Fresh Prince” doesn’t have the same lengthy “Brady Bunch” history: The “Fresh Prince” sitcom ran its course on NBC and, other than a 2020 HBO Max cast reunion, it was done in 1996 and Will Smith moved on to being a movie star.

“Bel-Air” features an all-new cast and is a reboot rather than a continuation, but watching “Bel-Air” makes one wonder: Is there a good enough reason to do this, especially since it follows after “All American,” which also began with a talented teen moving from a rough neighborhood to posh Beverly Hills?

“Bel-Air” is a glossy, expensive-looking soap that, like Fox’s “Our Kind of People,” puts the spotlight on uber-wealthy Black families.

But “fresh?” Not so much.