Dramatic Fresh Prince reboot loses second showrunner
The series is based on series writer Morgan Cooper’s viral video based on the Will Smith sitcom
TV News Showrunner
Now, this is the story all about how two showrunners stepped down from a dramatic reboot of a beloved sitcom. About two years ago, writer and director Morgan Cooper released a fan-made trailer for a modern retelling of the Will Smith sitcom The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. Simply titled Bel-Air, the three-and-half-minute video reimagined the series as the dramatic story of a Black teen from the inner city who gets in one little fight—you know how it goes. It’s a grittier take on the show, cutting out the stuff about license plates and dice in the mirror, and added these expressionistic shots of Will wearing an ornate crown.
The thing was a YouTube smash, making its way to one of YouTube’s most popular creators, Will Smith. About a year and a half after the trailer’s release, and one bidding war later, Smith announced that the show received a two-season order from a little streaming service called Peacock. You know about that, too. Peacock is a service that we all know and love.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, though, not all is well in Bel-Air. Showrunner Chris Collins, who previously worked on Sons Of Anarchy and The Wire, recently stepped down from the series, leaving it to co-showrunners T.J. Brady and Rasheed Newson. They will together act as the show’s third showrunner. Collins replaced Diane Houston as showrunner earlier this year. Interestingly enough, according to THR, the show is going in a different creative direction. That could mean many things, of course, but it certainly makes one wonder about just how committed the studio is to this whole dramatic Fresh Prince thing. They write, “Sources note that Peacock is looking for a broad-skewing network-style show, while Collins wanted to deliver an edgy, premium series. It’s unclear what Houston’s vision was for the series, which has undergone some rewrites.”
Collins was set to co-write the scripts with Cooper, who is still attached to the series. Still, Hollywood Reporter sources say that the studio is happy with what Collins delivered (happy enough to, you know, allow him to step down as showrunner), but who knows how much of that work will make it to the series.
45 Comments
He shouldn’t have come to work in this shirt
In the brief history of pop culture (and the much longer history of art) we have never been in an era where so much entertainment was recycled instead of original. It’s frankly embarrassing. Even Shakespeare did wildly creative and original things with his borrowed IPs. The multinational conglomerates that create most content are just so desperate for money.
Endless retellings of the same stories and reinterpretations of the same artistic inspirations have always been around (and for notable chunks of human history were the only approved forms of artistic expression). Case in point, you say “even Shakespeare” as though he was particularly guilty of repetition and recycling, rather than being uniquely adept at invention compared to his contemporaries.Periods of wild invention have typically been the exception, not the rule.
Periods of wild invention have typically been the exception, not the rule.Exactly. Things got creative and weird for about 4 years in the 70s and people are acting like that’s how it always was in ol’ Hollywoodland.
the original Fresh Prince was 90’s sit com at its best. that’s all i’m gonna say.
“okay… a show about Jesus’s last days before being crucified… but instead of a comedy, it’s a drama”
There is more original TV being produced now than at any point in history. Up until about a decade ago, American scripted TV shows were measured in the dozens. There are now well over 500 TV shows. Even if half of them are reboots, remakes, adaptations, etc, there are still hundreds of original shows. (Admittedly movies are a different story)
Humans have always rehashed their stories and concepts. Basically all European mythology is different regions telling new versions of the same stories about the same gods and demigods while occasionally adding in a few new characters. The difference now is that people are a lot more open about “hey I’m going to take this old story and retell it with a twist” than they were previously.
Right, but even retellings use different characters and different titles. Otherwise we’d have like 50 shows and movies titled “Othello” since 1955.
Not at all true. The Wizard of Oz from 1939 was like the 20th telling of the story on film. The Romans basically stole all of the Greek stories and retconned them. This is not by any means a unique or special time for this kind of thing.
The Romans basically stole all of the Greek stories and retconned them.
Brilliant!!
even this comment is recycled shit i’ve seen before!
The million and one Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, Wizard of Oz and Tarzan movies from the early days of film beg to disagree.
Maybe they should retool it as a comedy
The story about a woman whose script based on her life, job and family went from a request to change just the name one character into a descent into madness with space travel and Bond villains with aquatic super cars. It’s very funny.
God! I actually want to watch that now,
I’m actually struggling to parse the level of sincerity here. The “serious Fresh Prince reimagining” is not a joke in the traditional sense, because it doesn’t have a setup-hook-punchline structure, and the material in the trailer is presented exactly as an original dramatic concept would be. Yet it exists only insofar as it refers to an original piece of media that was a comedy, so there’s a layer of irony to it. (“Imagine if cheesy 90s sitcom were a gritty drama.”) But then, it seems as if the plan was to actually adapt the trailer into a genuine dramatic story, still using versions of the original sitcom characters. So if it’s a genuine drama based on an ironic interpretation of a real program produced as a comedy, does the final product still have any level of humour, or do we accept it as a legitimate dramatic piece in its own right?
HA: Tool!
Right, then change the lead to an alien and call it “Upscalien in Da House.”
How do I not recognize this episode? Seems like a good vintage.
“Homer the Father.” Its from Season 22 so its not too surprising that its not that recognizable (although this is when the show got a bit of an upswing and moved away from some of the crappier stuff from the previous 10 years) This episode is Homer getting addicted to a nostalgia TV network and basing all his parenting off of a Growing Pains parody. Its a decent story about Bart hating being taught a “valuable lesson” like a kid from an 80’s sitcom, but honestly the 80’s TV show parodies are just perfect. Enjoy the theme song to Thicker Than Waters and then be confused when you realize it wasn’t a real show.
There’s also an amazing bit at the end with James Lipton (providing his own voice) doing an interview with the grown-up and now messed up cast of the TV show.
according to THR, the show is going in a different creative direction. Because of course it is. Welcome to Hollywood. It’s good to hear the creator is still on board (Not that he’d quit; This is his big break!) but I have to wonder how he’s feeling now that this is likely going to be unrecognizable from his original vision.
Probably something along the lines of: “They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house! I’m not made of stone!”
First time seeing this, that was a really cool reimagining, I hope the creators get to create as close to their vision as possible.
I mean, it’s almost as if people somehow don’t actually want a mindless retread of something they liked 30 years ago or something. I mean, fleeting viral fame is clearly the only metric ever used to determine what is and is not a good idea, so a half-baked parody was such an ironclad lock that anyone with common sense would have surely invested millions in the concept and force people to pay to see it. It’s like the rules of economics and entertainment somehow didn’t apply here. I wonder what went wrong.
The original series was not great, honestly.
I’m not surprised this show is struggling on the showrunning side, because it is a deceptively weird concept to pitch, direct, and balance.The original video works on two levels, which is why it’s so good: first, the image of making a classic comedy into a serious drama is just inherently a pretty good joke. But also, Fresh Prince actually DID have a serious undercurrent of drama that video tapped into; the culture clash between Will and the Banks family, and the Banks family and both their past (Uncle Phil actually had some serious civil rights cred and history, yet he was leaving that by the wayside to win by the system’s rules) and occasionally society, were truly treated seriously by the original show.That’s a dichotomy you can work all corners of in a three minute video while still having clarity of purpose, but you order a whole season? Sure, everyone’s initially on the same page when they hear ‘yes, Fresh Prince but serious’, but where does it go? Is it a Riverdale-esque serious teen drama? Is it more of a dark and adult-focused thing? Without the initial pitches of ‘based on Quincy Jones’ childhood’ and ‘starring a big famous rapper as the star’, you have less of a clear focus point; do you still focus near-entirely on Will as the star, or do you shift focus more to Phil and Vivian? Do Carlton and Hilary even work in a serious drama?What about the fact it has roots in a comedy? Do you abandon that entirely? Do you take absurd sitcom scenarios seriously (again, like Riverdale did with classic Archie tropes) and revel in that strangeness? Do you convert it into a deadpan comedy? Or is it basically just a normal comedy that has serious-seeming set-dressing, comparable to some of Brooklyn Nine-Nine?Nothing is wrong with most of these angles, but everyone has to define and agree with them. And that’s actually less likely with a concept like ‘dramatic Fresh Prince reboot’, because everyone will immediately think that their interpretation of that is the right one.
I’m almost 100% positive that this was something that initially got accepted by everyone as a straight-up drama thing (either in the Riverdale vein or something else entirely), only for some execs to start getting jittery over the idea at some point and insist that comedy needs to be interwoven into it so that it can use nostalgia marketing. Personally, I’d make it into an absurdly melodramatic socially conscious thriller: have the first season deal with Will’s assailants pursuing him and threatening him in Bel-Air a la Cape Fear, only for the assailants to mysteriously die in the season finale so that the second season can be a murder mystery. And when the ratings inevitably dip, you can start getting artistic/weird like Twin Peaks!
The video was embarrassingly bad, like an SNL parody, I continue to be mystified as to why anyone would think it merited being expanded into a true series.
I’m calling it, this is gonna stink. It’s not a great idea. For everyone who’s ever watched the original, the absence of jokes is just going to be weird.Sounds like the studios are getting nervous. Never a good sign. This is likely going to end up pulling in too many different directions and end up a tonal mess.
A comedy without jokes is just fucking depressing. Like the first 20 minutes of every Disney film (where the main character suffers a lot) but just endless.
Wonder if they’ll get Trump in to cameo on this one?
Hmm.. I suspect that the network wants a “dramedy” approach. I hope that this doesn’t happen.
I’d be more into a rated R version of this.
It’s my fervent hope that this production continues to flounder, and that everyone involved moves on to better things.
Is the idea really that far off from All American? That show features a kid who moves from a poor neighborhood to a rich one so he can pursue his football dreams and is fueled by drama (confrontations with gangs, love triangles, flare ups with parental figures). I mean what made Fresh Prince unique and beloved was that it was a sitcom. Take that away and add manufactured drama and you probably do end up with a CW show (not saying that’s bad BTW, I enjoy plenty of CW shows including All American for what they are).
I was thinking the same thing. All American already did that but with football.
The series is based on series writer Morgan Cooper’s viral video based on the Will Smith sitcomFar be it from me to complain about the recycling of modern pop culture, but when we’re getting to the stage where we’re greenlighting adaptations of viral fan videos of old TV shows, not even the old TV shows, surely a barrel somewhere is scraped almost dry.
It’s not too late to call it off guys.
“Sources note that Peacock is looking for a broad-skewing network-style
show, while Collins wanted to deliver an edgy, premium series.”Seems to me that the appeal of a streaming platform is that you don’t need to go for broad-skewing, network-style shows, and can instead make programming with an edge and degree of freedom. You have to make stuff that people are compelled to pay to see if you want to hook subscribers, not stuff that reminds them of what they already get on ad-supported, FCC-regulated OTA networks. (My guess is that the execs are probably hedging their bets and want a show they can eventually run on Comcast’s traditional platforms.)
Seems like it should be a CW series then they can cross over with All American.
Peacock is a service that we all know and love.
Based on that screenshot, I’m assuming this is what happens when Will hooks up with the Illuminati, and that’s why the show keeps having problems.
Who would have guessed trying to stretch out a 3-minute viral video into a drama series would be difficult?
In west philadelphia where I lived my mama they took my sitcom life and turned it into a drama