If you’re not familiar, “Bel-Air” started life as something of a joke, a 2019 alternate universe trailer by Morgan Cooper (who directs the pilot here) about a Prestige TV-era, serious take on the classic sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the show that helped turn Will Smith into a star. The funny thing is that Smith and others actually liked the idea, realizing that the fish-out-of-water concept of the comedy could easily be turned into something more dramatic, a sort of modern, progressive blend of both “Fresh Prince” and California dramas like “The O.C.” The very existence of “Bel-Air” has already been mocked on “Saturday Night Live” (where they imagined what a serious “Family Matters” might look like), and an uncertainty of tone hampers the opening episodes, which alternate between tongue-in-cheek references for fans and reminders that this is supposed to be taken deadly seriously, especially its messages about being a young Black man in 2022.
For example, the show opens by detailing what happened in this iteration’s version of when Will (Jabari Banks) got “into one little fight and my mom got scared.” In the premiere, Will is a rising basketball star who gets into such a serious conflict on the court that he ends up shooting a gun to protect a friend and is then arrested. After pulling some strings to get him out of jail, Will’s frightened mom (April Parker Jones) sends him to Bel-Air to live with his mega-rich Uncle Phillip Banks (Adrian Holmes) and Aunt Viv (Cassandra Freeman). The kind-hearted couple have been reimagined as power players in the Bel-Air arts and political scene, with Uncle Phil mounting a run for District Attorney and hints that Viv has silenced an artistic side her current social class doesn’t allow. Of course, the couple has a British butler named Geoffrey (Jimmy Akingbola), reimagined here as such a smooth player that Will calls him ‘Idris’ (as in Elba) when they first meet.
Of course, there are also Will’s cousins. Ashley (Akira Akbar) doesn’t make much of an impression in the first three, but Hilary (Coco Jones) gets an arc about how she’s attempting to maintain her status as a chef and food influencer against a corporation that wants her to tone down her ethnicity. And, of course, there’s gotta be a Carlton (Olly Sholotan). Remember how his conservative, sweater-loving style was basically just the punchline on the original show? Well, his perfectionism has been amplified here into a commentary on the lengths some people will go to in order to fit in. For example, Will is stunned to see Carlton sing along while his fellow Lacrosse team members are using the n-word in a song, and Carlton is seen repeatedly having to fight to fit in. And then things get particularly problematic when Carlton’s ex-girlfriend Lisa (a charismatic Simone Jay Jones) takes an interest in his cousin Will. Add a drug problem and this is a Carlton that would make Alfonso Ribeiro’s version run for cover.
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