Contemplating Bel-Air, Peacock’s unsmiling re-creation of the beloved Will Smith sitcom, one wonders if other early-90s comedies are due to be re-imagined as dramas. Full House, for example, might work just as well as a meditation on Bay Area real estate shortages. Who wouldn’t watch a Seinfeld re-conceived as a courageous #MeToo tear-jerker? Soaring above them all would be an updated Saved by the Bell, in which now-Gov. Zack Morris takes an ax to California’s education budget and sends underprivileged children fleeing to Bayside. What’s that you say? Peacock already made the last of those, with exactly that plot? Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
Bel-Air stars newcomer Jabari Banks as Will, the West Philly native forced to trade his cheesesteaks for the baronial splendor of LA’s toniest neighborhood. In Andy and Susan Borowitz’s 1990 conception, Will’s dislocation sprang from a minor playground scuffle, presented with comic flair during The Fresh Prince’s entertaining title sequence. Here, and unsurprisingly given Peacock’s desire to take a “fresh and raw” look at its fish-out-of-water story, things are darker. Feuding with drug dealers over a basketball wager, Will brandishes a firearm and sets in motion a conflict that could easily turn deadly. Determined to protect both him and his Division 1 scholarship, Will’s mother puts him on the next plane to California, where the wealthier branch of the family has agreed to keep him out of gang-related trouble.
True to its revisionist aims, Bel-Air gives a similar contemporizing treatment to its supporting characters, the extended relatives for whom Will’s appearance represents both a disturbance and an opportunity for self-reflection. In the case of Carlton (Olly Sholotan), Will’s cousin and unfriendly rival, the Urkel-esque goofball played by Alfonso Ribeiro has given way to a prescription-drug-abusing lacrosse star with a throng of “problematic” friends. Cousin Hilary (Coco Jones), meanwhile, has gone from lovable ditz to budding Instagram chef, with a follower count that has begun to attract serious attention.
Comparably changed but significantly less engaging are the more mature members of the Los Angeles clan. A high-powered lawyer with an eye on the district attorney’s chair, Uncle Phil (Adrian Holmes) must balance his campaign’s needs with the exigencies of Will’s arrival. Equally distracted is Aunt Viv (Cassandra Freeman), whose own professional identity has long been sublimated for the sake of her husband’s career. To Bel-Air’s credit, the only update that veers fully into the preposterous is the one attending Geoffrey Thompson (Jimmy Akingbola), the family’s “house manager” and longtime fixer. In the original series, Geoffrey was a charming (if faintly ridiculous) English butler. Here, the character has been reinterpreted as a stone-cold killer, able to track and dispatch Will’s drug-dealing nemesis with a few clicks on his smartphone.
To the extent that Bel-Air proved willing to treat its characters as individuals rather than political props, the series might have made something compelling of its reappropriated source material. Instead, and lamentably, the show’s every conflict can be boiled down to the matter of “authenticity” — the question, as tedious as it is ideologically charged, of whose blackness counts as the real thing. Accompanying Will on a voter-registration drive, the moderate Carlton finds himself unable to connect with his fellow African Americans. Seeking an influential pastor’s support, Uncle Phil must humble himself with a song-and-dance routine on the steps of a black fraternity. For Hilary, authenticity requires rebuffing a food magazine that wants, improbably, to “tone down” her spicy recipes. In each and every one of these cases, the job of Will is to demonstrate authoritative blackness while offering spine-stiffening advice. “You can’t rise if all you do is play white,” the young man tells Hilary in a representative scene. Proponents of color-blindness, consider yourself zinged.
Let us grant that Bel-Air is television by and for the kind of people who thrill to such racialist nonsense. Need it be crassly hypocritical, as well? Midway through the pilot episode, an enraged Will confronts Carlton for remaining silent while his white friends rap along with N-word-spewing hip-hop. The moment is meant to be instructive, yet, contrary to the show’s intentions, Will’s cousin has the better part of the argument. “You’re really flipping out over a word that black rappers sell to millions of white people every day?” a defensive Carlton retorts. Perhaps because Bel-Air is itself built on the commodification of blackness for a largely white audience, Will has nothing substantive to offer in response.
Indeed, the series’s gravest flaw may be exactly this ideological myopia, a condition that manifests in both the show’s writing and its anachronistic sense of the political moment. When in episode four Uncle Phil comes out for “defunding the police,” even the dullest viewer will take note of the family’s private security apparatus and their attendant insulation from soft-on-crime consequences. News junkies will observe that LA’s real-life district attorney is facing a recall election for similar radicalism. In short, Bel-Air plays like a show that was conceived at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement’s power and has made no concessions to the subsequent (and well-deserved) backlash. If the series were a conservative satire of liberal stupidity, it could hardly proceed more brilliantly.
Doubtless, some audiences will flock to Bel-Air despite, or because of, its brazenness. Others will forgive all for the sake of its dramatic performances, which are uniformly good and occasionally excellent. (Sholotan and Jones are standouts.) In the end, however, the series is likely to collapse under the weight of its exhausted racial politics, a burden that may win the praise of mainstream critics but is difficult to hold aloft for long. The Fresh Prince, as light and airy as a cloud, was not only iconic but fun. Bel-Air, by contrast, is intentionally anti-fun. It is a show of its time.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
