'Different World' revisited
Nick At Nite has been showing this marathon of "A Different World" tonight and all week.
And the really cool thing? They're packaging it as a Hillman College class reunion, with footage of the actors as the ADW characters and where they are today, 13 years after they graduated/the show ended in 1993. (EDIT: Check out the spots and interviews here.) There's Jasmine Guy as Whitley and Kadeem Hardison as Dwayne Wayne, Darryl Bell as Ron (who is mayor somewhere), Cree Summer as Freddie (now a TV court show judge), Dawnn Lewis as Jaleesa (a successful doctor) ... and, of course, Lisa Bonet as Denise Huxtable.
I was 7 years old when "A Different World" began. (I don't remember Marisa Tomei, "CSI"'s Gary Dourdan or Jada Pinkett Smith being on the show, but they were.) It was during a brief time in TV history where I could watch a sitcom with people who looked like me, and it wasn't some piece of buffoonery. This show was about an HBCU! This was my first real exposure to the idea of college when I was growing up. And to see a whole college full of black people was a very interesting thing. The show dealt with issues of race and class, showing different kinds of black people, and showed a window into a part of black culture that hadn't been shown before -- and one that was pretty foreign to little 7-year-old me.
And it's sad that this show couldn't get on the air right now. Shit, there may be fewer blacks on TV now than there were then. But we do have this year's "Survivor" dividing each team by race.
And the more it annoys me these days that one of my favorite shows, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," appears utterly bereft of anyone who isn't white. They JUST got a Middle Eastern guy to do some Iraq bits. This show's been on 10 fucking years already! Get with the program.
Sigh.
And the really cool thing? They're packaging it as a Hillman College class reunion, with footage of the actors as the ADW characters and where they are today, 13 years after they graduated/the show ended in 1993. (EDIT: Check out the spots and interviews here.) There's Jasmine Guy as Whitley and Kadeem Hardison as Dwayne Wayne, Darryl Bell as Ron (who is mayor somewhere), Cree Summer as Freddie (now a TV court show judge), Dawnn Lewis as Jaleesa (a successful doctor) ... and, of course, Lisa Bonet as Denise Huxtable.
I was 7 years old when "A Different World" began. (I don't remember Marisa Tomei, "CSI"'s Gary Dourdan or Jada Pinkett Smith being on the show, but they were.) It was during a brief time in TV history where I could watch a sitcom with people who looked like me, and it wasn't some piece of buffoonery. This show was about an HBCU! This was my first real exposure to the idea of college when I was growing up. And to see a whole college full of black people was a very interesting thing. The show dealt with issues of race and class, showing different kinds of black people, and showed a window into a part of black culture that hadn't been shown before -- and one that was pretty foreign to little 7-year-old me.
And it's sad that this show couldn't get on the air right now. Shit, there may be fewer blacks on TV now than there were then. But we do have this year's "Survivor" dividing each team by race.
And the more it annoys me these days that one of my favorite shows, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," appears utterly bereft of anyone who isn't white. They JUST got a Middle Eastern guy to do some Iraq bits. This show's been on 10 fucking years already! Get with the program.
Sigh.