Now you can explore all these differences between different slices of Black life. What was new about this one, you take Will, who was basically from the ‘hood, and instead of putting him with a White family, you put him with a Black family that is just as different in this telling as a regular rich White family would be.Īnd you can explore a lot of very different kinds of topics just because of that one dynamic. The other thing that I really do like about ‘The Fresh Prince’ – it’s a pretty simple template, which is ‘fish out of water.’ And there are many, many, many fish-out-of-water sitcoms. Then the old classics like ‘The Jeffersons’ and ‘Good Times.’ Those were just about Black families but there was no hip-hop vibe.
‘The Cosby Show.’ ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ wasn’t really a Black show but it had two main Black characters. 1 thing is just that hip-hop vibe because that had never been on TV before. Q: When you look back at it 30 years later, not as a 14-year-old but as someone who writes about pop culture, what’s groundbreaking about this show?Ī: The No. But back then, when it was younger, it was just the funniest show. When you watch it today, that type of very broad sitcom humor still kind of appeals. It was a show that was much more in my wheelhouse.Ī lot of it was because of Will and his Fresh Prince persona. There was a lot of silliness and quick quips back and forth. The appeal of ‘The Fresh Prince’ was that it was very funny. It was slightly before my time in terms of what I was interested in. Q: How was it different from other shows that you watched, or shows that featured Black characters and themes?Ī: So ‘The Cosby Show’ obviously was the main predecessor to the ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.’ But I didn’t really watch that. So I remember watching the preview commercials and just being excited.
They just sort of took this rapper, who had this kind of fun, almost cartoonish kind of comedic persona, and put it into a TV. I didn’t know what the show was going to be about. So there was the show, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s the Fresh Prince, and this is a cool kind of hip-hop show.’ And that kind of thing didn’t exist back then.
Did you already know the music of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince at that point?Ī: That was definitely the entryway because they had ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand,” and that was on constant radio play. Q: You were 13 or 14 when the show began. Here, in an interview edited for clarity and length, is Palmer’s story all about how his life got turned upside down in the years he worked on the book.
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