It’s often the case that nothing disappoints like a sitcom reboot. The Malcolm in the Middle revival is missing Dewey. The updated Saved By the Bell felt like detention punishment.
And Just Like That … had Sex and the City diehards sharpening their stilettos. When Netflix announced plans to reboot A Different World two years ago, fans of the Cosby Show spinoff mostly saw reasons not to. Too much time had passed since the show’s 1992 sign-off.
Too much cultural currency had been invested in the show and in Hillman College – the series backdrop that was like Wakanda before Wakanda, a grand bastion of fictional yet somehow tangible Black excellence that drove attendance at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and a crowd-sourced CRT education boom online. And too much cynicism had set in among American TV viewers to bother replicating the show’s classic multicam setup – too dusty and fusty, they might sneer. Despite all this, the born-again A Different World landed on the streamer this week, and I am relieved – and, really, quite stunned to report that we finally have a sitcom reboot that actually meets the brief.
The sitcom reboot would seem to have a tougher assignment than its film and TV drama counterparts. It’s not enough to simply advance the story, update the premise or facilitate a clean handoff from the beloved foundational cast to the new. It has to feel fresh and like old times, bring back the long-lost ritual of gathering around the TV as a country to escape into a world where laughter helps navigate us past our differences and disagreements on the way to genuine community.
A Different World wasn’t just a Black thing. It was spun off from the most influential sitcom of its time, mainstream America’s introduction to an upwardly mobile Black family that reveled in African American culture, history and arts. A Different World followed Lisa Bonet’s Denise Huxtable, the bohemian in the family, as she studied at her parents’ alma mater, Hillman – already well established as part of The Cosby Show’s general commitment to promoting real HBCUs such as Howard, Tuskegee and Wilberforce.
But when Bonet became pregnant with her first child, Zoë Kravitz, in the middle of A Different World’s first season, it made Bill Cosby wary of the optics of portraying an expectant mother in college. Bonet exited A Different World after its debut season and returned to The Cosby Show. Debbie Allen, the prodigious actor, dancer and Howard alumna, took over as the showrunner for A Different World in season two and effectively saved the series from cancellation.
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