![]() With a less fully defined revamped character, Banks has a much harder job. The easy translation would have been to make Carlton into nerdy comedic relief - like Seth Cohen, if we want to use The OC comparisons - but as Sholotan plays it, being Carlton is tearing Carlton apart it’s one of the few changes from the original that pays immediate dividends. In this version, Will arrives as a fish-out-of-water only after Carlton experienced his own outsider journey, and Carlton’s denial of his racial identity is played here as self-hatred. Sholotan is the series’ other standout, but perhaps only if you’ve grown up with inexplicable empathy for Carlton and wondered what Alfonso Ribeiro could have done if that much-maligned (inside the show) character had been allowed to have inner demons. I’ll leave it for you to determine if “And in this incarnation, Uncle Viv and Uncle Phil totally have sex” sounds like a justification for this revised premise.” Either way, Holmes and Freeman are great, and if you pretend that Akingbola’s Geoffrey is less subservient Man Friday and more a part of an unspoken throuple, Bel-Air becomes generally more intriguing. ![]() Holmes and Freeman have power-couple chemistry and, unlike Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv in the sitcom, they convey a relationship with some real heat. Holmes, in particular, is a fierce presence and offers regular reminders that although Uncle Phil was frequently mocked for his elite disconnectedness from his rural roots in the sitcom, James Avery played every moment like Shakespeare. If Bel-Air begins to hint at its own voice in the third episode, in which Hunky Uncle Phil and Sexy Aunt Viv reconnect with their Black fraternity/sorority friends and ponder the gaps between their own current and past racial identities, its successes have a lot to do with casting. It’s probably the most 2022 thing imaginable to take one adored show and reboot it in a way that feels derivative of at least a half-dozen other shows. ![]() Because the concept here, comfortably in TV’s history of outhouse-to-penthouse storytelling, ends up bearing less resemblance to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and more to The CW’s All American, which already felt like a more racially conscious version of The OC, which already felt like a grittier version of Beverly Hills, 90210. This is what happens when you attempt to call the bluff of a mock trailer that felt like it was intended to show Cooper’s clever vision as a director, but not really as a proof-of-concept anybody wanted to see as an ongoing series. Of course, without the Fresh Prince references, Bel-Air is almost entirely humorless, a chilly act of over-compensation. Especially after the pilot, which Cooper directs with moody flair, all tie-ins to the sitcom feel forced, like Will turning his prep school blazer inside out to cement his status as a fashion plate. It’s big and obvious things, like the presence of Jazz, or Hillary telling Will she’s going to find him an outfit suitable for a prince, or dedicated British butler Geoffrey, played by Jimmy Akingbola as an iPad-waving Jamaican “house manager.” But it’s much more frequently smaller nods, like the presence of Will’s West Philly buddy Tray, a nod to the part played by a young Don Cheadle in the sitcom. Much more convincingly, the tension in Bel-Air arises from the notion that on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will and everybody else tormented Carlton relentlessly and now he’s out for some well-deserved revenge.ĭo you need to be a fan of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to enjoy Bel-Air? Well, certainly knowledge of the seminal NBC comedy is necessary to be amused by the new show, which spends at least its first hour dropping references and counting on people to giggle in recognition. Over the introductory episodes, drama stems from Will’s problems adjusting to his sunny new home pressure from Uncle Phil, who’s in the earliest stages of a campaign for district attorney and a possible looming threat from back in West Philly that I never bought for a single second, because what low-level Philadelphia street dealer is going to be so offended by a minor playground tussle as to possibly fly across the country for revenge? It’s been a decade since he saw them, or his cousins - aspiring food influencer Hilary (Coco Jones), energetic tween Ashley (Akira Akbar) and Carlton (Olly Sholotan), whose code-switching abilities have made him a popular lacrosse standout at Bel-Air Academy, but not necessarily the sort of avatar of Black masculinity Will respects. Jones), Will arrives at the palatial abode of his attorney uncle Phillip Banks (Adrian Holmes) and his former artist aunt Viv (Cassandra Freeman). ![]() After a first-class flight and an expensive ride from the airport with a friendly guy named Jazz (Jordan L.
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