Last year, Netflix added all six seasons of A Different World (ADW), the spin-off of The Cosby Show. It was designed to star Lisa Bonet in her role of Denise Huxtable, the sometimes wayward and unfocused daughter from the Huxtable family as she attended college at a fictional Historically Black College/University (HBCU). The show, however, morphed into something much more than that.
Before I douse you all in my journey in media and blackness as an adolescent, let’s do some math first (I promise this won’t hurt). I’m currently thirty five years old. The first episode of A Different World was titled “Reconcilable Differences” and it aired on September 24th, 1987, just before my 8th birthday. And just at this moment, I realized how much TV I watched as a young kid. I was raised on The Cosby Show (and training in secret at night to Public Enemy that I got from the older kids in the neighborhood, but that’s another column altogether). I somehow remember having a big crush on Lisa Bonet (1. Who didn’t? and 2. “having” probably indicates past tense as in no longer… but I have no further comment on that) and the fact that she was going to have a show featured on her was pretty amazing to my not-really-knowing-anything-about-girls-except-I-liked-how-they-looked adolescent self. Well, Lisa Bonet, true to form, lasted all of one season of the show, but that turned out to be the best thing for it as it was able to reshape itself into more of an ensemble show. At the time, I didn’t know or comprehend any of this, but what was not lost on me was that I was watching a funny show that had beautiful black people everywhere. Let’s not pretend like that was insignificant. I watched A Different World as a kid and I’m sure I revisited it many times as a teenager and young adult. But with it coming to Netflix, it’s the first time, as an adult, that I can sit and digest what this show was, how it affected me and why it’s so damn important. Here are five observations from binging a large amount of A Different World over a weekend, as a full grown man.
The Game Is The Same, Just Got More Fierce
Do you understand that if a show that followed students at an HBCU where the whole point of the show wasn’t about some scandal or treachery or murder, but instead about black college students growing up and experiencing college debuted on a major network in 2015, the Year of our Lord, it would seem like some unfathomable venture? [quote_right]but what was not lost on me was that I was watching a funny show that had beautiful black people everywhere. [/quote_right]Are there “Black sitcoms” on Network TV today? Well, there’s one, but we’ll get back to that. But it would be different than anything on TV right now. But that show, did in fact exist almost thirty years ago. People can always talk about The Cosby Show and its impact and they’re not wrong, but it was the outlier. It was called that because Bill Cosby was already huge and an entertainment commodity that willed that show into being. Bill’s name is all over ADW, but there was no established star frontlining the cast of that show. Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Cree Summers… they were all relatively unknowns in big TV circles before this show and Lisa Bonet doesn’t equate to Bill Cosby as someone that could drag them into popularity. The closest that a show came to A Different World for it’s heft and relevance has to be Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but sometimes the sheer hyperbolic entity that was Will Smith could be a distraction from what the show was capable of. Add to the fact that it was about a wealthy Black family that rarely went head on with the construct of whiteness and racial bias (save a few “impact” episodes) except when it was a punchline (like everything about Carlton or the elitism of Hilary that was almost exclusively showcased as classism).
The show had to be good to last that long and THEY had to be good. When you hear people my age wax poetically when it comes to predominantly Black TV shows at the behest of shows like Empire, it’s because we remember a time where Black folks were on a major network and none of them were being investigated for murder. I don’t watch shows like Empire because I’m generally not interested, but I’m not one of the people calling for its disbandment either. Is it “necessary” television? Ehhhh. I do think Empire is still important and I’m glad that Black people can create iconic characters (like Taraji P. Henson’s “Cookie”). But if you aren’t of the generation of Black kids that grew up seeing smart and witty and successful Black folk go to college, graduate, lead happy lives and still be Black as all hell, then you gotta understand where we’re coming from when we get nostalgic.
