Hacker Cinema
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
1990 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 6 seasons
Created by Andy Borowitz, Susan Borowitz
Will, a street-smart teenager, moves from the tough streets of West Philly to posh Bel-Air to live with his Uncle Philip, Aunt Vivian, his cousins — spoiled Hilary, preppy Carlton and young Ashley — and their sophisticated British butler, Geoffrey. Though Will’s antics and upbringing contrast greatly with the upper-class lifestyle of his extended relatives, he soon finds himself right at home as a loved part of the family.
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8 comments on Hacker News
WHAT. A. RUN. From gigging weddings with Ray Charles to helping Jacob Collier launch his career, and Michael Jackson wasn't even the halfway point.
I briefly saw him in 1990-1, can't remember exactly, when he came to the UK screening of Listen Up! He had already done more than enough to pack an entire film about his life, and that was 34 years ago and Fresh Prince of Bel Air hadn't even screened.
The Soul Bossa Nova album is on now, I'll go upstairs and put Sinatra at the Sands on later, and work my way back up to now.
RIP QDJ Jr, you were a composing, producing, arranging, making shit happen powerhouse of a Dude.
The interesting thing about sitcoms is I've never heard anyone talk about a new sitcom in years (maybe Brooklyn Nine Nine?), maybe people are rewatching Seinfeld, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, The Office, etc as those are the only good ones we have.
The entertainment is also different since a sitcom doesn't require much attention and is much more bingeable whereas regular shows are hit-or-miss.
But still you can't really mass produce Black Mirror or other shows without them going super downhill. Already for Black Mirror the episodes are always ranked by quality, by season and all-in-all. You mass produce these kinds of TV shows and you end up with The Walking Dead which just takes on a repeat of the same thing.
Some people look for any excuse to be outraged. But I think people are more curious than outraged. I don't have any opinion about the existence this company but it did make me think. For example:
> When I grew up in the 90s, it seemed like black people had a relatively high number of TV shows to choose from like "Martin", "Living Single," and "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air". It felt good. I felt represented. Unfortunately, it turns out the 90s were an aberration
I also grew up watching shows like these, and being a white person watching a black family didn't feel strange or incongruous at all.
Something I've already wondered is, what if that aspect of the 90s wasn't an aberration, but a feature from a time when there were fewer channels and diversity was concentrated in the fewer places everyone watched, due to how content was structured?
And is it unfortunate that relegating "black" content to its own service gives it a "niche" status that it doesn't deserve? Am I missing out on good content because signing up for any new streaming service is a high bar and something I don't do?
Will the bigger streaming services drop the content offered by this one, so that the largest audiences lose the opportunity to see this content?
Was having fewer channels actually in a way anti-monoculture?
It's actually much deeper and more insidious than this.
These kinds of shows and movies that you grew up watching provide the character and narrative archetypes that you act out in your own life. This affects every aspect of your life. You are basing your emotional responses and behaviors and making life choices based off whatever ideas and values had currency among a small group of animators/story writers/producers/etc that were active during your childhood.
I remember coming to this realization many years ago (I'm 28 now). I would sometimes catch myself actively conceptualizing a particular movie/tv character in trying to understand how to behave or conceptualize a certain situation I was in.
Since then I have done a deep dive into the Western canon including history, philosophy, psychology, and religion. From engaging with all of that I have basically purged these contemporary archetypes and narratives and replaced them with traditional, more grounded ones (e.g. from Fresh Prince of Bel Air to Julius Caesar, from the History Channel to Herodotus).
It's akin to replacing a life long diet of gas station junk food with fresh organic fruits, vegetables, and meats. Since then I have gained an immeasurable sense of equanimity and inner calm. Now when I call upon these archetypes to understand the world and how I should feel and respond to it, I am engaging with things which have roots that go very deep.
So?
Not everyone in the US is starved for upstream. Not everyone is going to lose their mind if their friend's Plex doesn't have Five 9s availability -- and let's be real, with all the things that can and do go wrong between a user and a service on the Internet, Three 9s is optimistic for anything.
And whose subscription service has Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? Saved by the Bell? Countless other shows and movies that aren't available with any of them?
Disney movies? Add a Trakt list to Radarr, done.
The Bill Cosby show/Fresh prince of Bel Air showed African Americans in the non-sterotypical manner. How did that work out? Outliers don't mean they work in all cases. Again, I point to the fact that these are societal problems, you can't criticize writers and producers of a TV show with this burden. They aren't incarnations of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. They're just trying to make money, it's a TV show for the umpteenth time.
it doesn't take a genius to realize america indeed has the racial problem. just look at the popular tv shows targeting at black audience, e.g. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (it's a fun show, watch and count how many whites in it?)
And The Wire ranks below The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in "Law" themed tv shows? huh?