In honor of the first full year of What's Alan Watching?, get 20% off an annual subscription to the What's Alan Writing? main paid tier, for all my reviews and recaps.
As TV revival candidates go, A Different World is both an obvious choice and a fraught one. The original series, which ran on NBC from 1987-1993, was a big hit. More importantly, it was a trailblazer in Black representation on television, with a huge cast of actors of color, set at a fictional HBCU in Virginia, constantly touching on areas of Black history and contemporary issues in Black America that few TV shows to that point had been willing to go anywhere near. And the setting creates an easy legasequel setup, where the cast can feature a mix of original characters now working at Hillman College, while several of their children are students.
But the series was also a spinoff of The Cosby Show, created by Bill Cosby, and its first season was centered on Cosby's fictional daughter Denise Huxtable. (Even after Lisa Bonet left the show as part of a major Season Two retooling, other Huxtables kept periodically visiting the campus.) Cosby's name isn't listed anywhere in Netflix's A Different World revival — debuting today on the 39th anniversary of the original series premiere — but he's almost certainly getting some kind of monetary cut as the creator and an executive producer of the original.
As with all things Cosby Show-related, it becomes a question of how much you want to compartmentalize and celebrate the good work of all the other people who were not revealed to have done the things that came to light about Cosby. For me, A Different World is far enough removed from the show, and man, that inspired it, that it feels worth the effort to try again. And this new version, run by Felicia Pride — with assistance from original series veterans like Debbie Allen, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Reggie Rock Bythewood — has put a lot of thought into how to update the title for the present day. Not all of it works, especially as the season gradually morphs from a mix of comedy and soap opera to almost entirely the latter. But there's a lot of good stuff here involving characters and ideas both old and new.