Bel-Air

'Bel Air,' Peacock's revamp of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,' isn't just a misfire. It's a heartbreaking reminder of what Hollywood imagines its Black ...

It’s a reminder that when racial progress is measured by Black people gaining entry into white spaces — whether Hollywood or the moneyed streets of Bel-Air — it perpetuates the very ideas of whiteness and power that created those systems in the first place. But the royalty imagery is a tell, indicating where the politics and interests of the show truly lie — not with breaking the systems but by becoming their masters. In episode two, as Will chokes playing basketball, his mind reeling back to his harrowing incident with the cops at the start of the series, he has a conversation with Uncle Phil about “the system.” Uncle Phil believes it can be reformed. Uncle Phil feels like a particular failure, with the warmth and care that previously defined the character lacking on the page and in the performance. Bel-Air — within its marketing and the visual landscape of the show itself — is obsessed with royalty. One of the show’s earliest tells comes to bear through the relationship between Will and Carlton (a dramatically grating Olly Sholotan). In a sequence late in the premiere episode, Will is trying and failing to settle into his new life. Striding into the locker room, Will finds a gaggle of white students, with Carlton in the center, singing along to a rap song and spouting the N-word with abandon. The show attempts to bottle swagger, taking the imagery and argot of Black neighborhoods to communicate a confused message: that Black excellence is equated with wealth. To untangle the issues inherent in Bel-Air is to take a tour through the pitfalls of Hollywood itself when it comes to Black visual representation. But we live in an exceedingly dark timeline, where Bel-Air is a byproduct of an industry unwilling to give these stories the radical political and social context they deserve. Is the industry waking up or is it realizing it can stripmine Black aesthetics — language, style, swagger — using Black artists in front of and behind the camera to hide the fact that these works are just as uninspiring as what’s come before? Bel-Air, Peacock’s dramatic revamp of beloved 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, may not kill the dream entirely, but it effectively demonstrates how hollow and misguided a dream it is.

Bel-Air's Jabari Banks talks to PEOPLE about taking on Will Smith's Fresh Prince role and the advice the Oscar nominee has given him.

"It's been such a humbling, humbling experience," he notes. Like, is this even real?' A big part of that was Will, but a huge part of that was Jabari." ... What's the balance of being yourself and evolving look like?" "He's taught me so much already and it's crazy. "It'll all be intertwined. "I think we all recognized that coming into this whole experience," he continues. It's such a huge part of my life," says Banks. "We got the Will Smith Christmas sweaters, my whole family has it. She said it's like if you go into each character's diary and you read what they were actually going through in the inner workings of their lives and their emotions through the arc of the show because, man, the stakes are high in this situation. "It's interesting because we get to dive deep into these characters," he continues. "It's really above me, I'd say. "It transcends language, for sure — this whole experience," he explains. Speaking to PEOPLE exclusively, Banks, 23, says he was quite familiar with the Smith-led series prior to his Bel-Air casting.

Morgan Cooper went from striking gold on YouTube to reimagining 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' for Peacock. But he's only just beginning.

Unsurprisingly, Cooper has a list of people he wants to work with in the future: Issa Rae, Donald Glover, Mahershala Ali, Janelle Monáe, Winston Duke, Brian Tyree Henry, and cinematographer Bradford Young. He’s also become enamored of limited series (“There’s a definite ending, so you’re able to go really deep with characters,” he says) and has a cast in mind for one. “I humbly hope I’ve been a mentor to him in the process of executive producing and showrunning for TV, but he’s absolutely a mentor to me,” North says. “We had a three-and-a-half-minute production that was on screen, that went viral and got this whole party started,” he says. It became a Vimeo Staff Pick Best of the Year nominee and won the Tribeca X Award for Best Feature at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, showing even more people that Cooper could create outside of pre-existing intellectual property. “Some people might consider it dark because of my flavor of cinematography, how it was lit, and the themes explored, but for me, it was just grounding this in drama in a way that’s authentic and adding parts of my life and things that I’ve seen,” he says. It’s clear that there are realities about race and class Cooper wanted to acknowledge, but he says he wasn’t trying to get on a soapbox to make some grand statement about society. “He also appreciated the fact that I didn’t wait around,” he says. But The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was still only capable of exploring these issues to an extent because of its genre and format. That path didn’t feel tangible for Cooper, who was born in Kansas City and lived in Grandview, Missouri, and Kansas City’s Martin City neighborhood before settling in Lee’s Summit as a teenager: “I didn’t even know that career was a possibility,” he says. The Bel-Air trailer is frequently referred to as “dark” because its mood stands in such stark contrast to the original series. The Kansas City, Missouri, native hoped that his beloved Chiefs would be playing in the Super Bowl in Los Angeles—the city he currently resides in—on the same night that Bel-Air, the dramatic rendition of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that Cooper developed with Will Smith, was premiering on Peacock. “That’s what I was trying to manifest,” the 30-year-old Cooper says the day after the Chiefs’ loss in the AFC championship game. But this rendition of Uncle Phil isn’t the irritated-but-ultimately-loving father figure James Avery played in the original series—he is, in his own words, “the law.” And the antagonism between Will and his privileged cousin Carlton isn’t playful, it’s downright hostile.

This reimagining of the popular 90s sitcom is full of annoying caricatures, is monotonously intense and doesn't seem to know what it is – or where it's ...

Perhaps it wants to hit a younger demographic, as shown by the way episode two trots out the familiar plots of a standard high-school drama. One of the countless magical properties of the sitcom format is that it has a particular ability to create moving dramatic moments, because viewers are wrongfooted when the clown mask suddenly drops: the Fresh Prince episode where Will and Carlton find themselves the victims of racist policing, for instance, or the one where Will’s neglectful father reappears and then abandons his son again, have extra power because they sneak up in the cloak of a gag-filled comedy. Since Bel-Air has chosen to retain the premise, character names and some of the title of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, it invites comparisons.

In 2019, Kansas City native Morgan Cooper released a project months in the making. The director created his own reboot concept of "The Fresh Prince of ...

“They originally asked me to provide artwork for the Bel-Air mansion, the Banks mansion, but after that, they had a bigger role for me," Wilcox told KSHB 41. "They decided to ask me if I can provide artwork for a main character in the show who does art. KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In 2019, Kansas City native Morgan Cooper released a project months in the making.

Here's how to watch "Bel-Air" online for free and where to stream the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" reboot without a Peacock subscription or a TV.

Another way to watch Bel-Air online for free is to be a Cox subscriber or know someone who is. See the full Bel-Air cast below. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale. Read on for step-by-step instructions on how to watch Bel-Air with Peacock, Peacock Premium or Peacock Premium Plus. If you want to watch Bel-Air online for free, there is a way, but you’ll need to be an Xfinity subscriber or know someone who is. Peacock has a guide for how to connect your Xfinity and Peacock accounts, but we also listed the steps below - VisitPeacock.com Bel-Air is available to stream on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, which offers three plans: a Peacock Free, which users can sign up for with just their email; Peacock Premium, which includes ads and costs $4.99 per month; and Peacock Premium Plus, which is ad-free and costs $9.99 per month. - VisitPeacock.com I just had to lean into my instincts and everything that I’ve learned from my experiences, and there’s so many parallels between me and Will, the character.” Cooper told the magazine that Banks was the only choice as Will from his first audition. - VisitPeacock.com Bel-Air, which stars a new cast as the original characters from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, is a more dramatic version of the sitcom and sees Will’s mother send him to live with his uncle and aunt in Bel-Air, Los Angeles, to straighten him out after he’s involved in a gang fight during a street basketball game in Philadelphia. The reboot is based on Morgan Cooper’s 2019 short film of the same title.