Peacock lands the gritty Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air reboot, gives it a 2-season order
After what has apparently been an intense and rather brief bidding war, Peacock has won Bel-Air, the gritty drama reboot of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air that started life as a YouTube parody before Will Smith got involved, called up some people involved with the original Fresh Prince, and gave Morgan Cooper—the person behind the YouTube video—a chance to make it a real thing. According to Variety, Peacock is giving Bel-Air a two-season order, with Chris Collins serving as showrunner and co-writing with Cooper.
Peacock is a somewhat surprising destination for Bel-Air, since HBO Max not only has the whole original series but is putting together a reunion special for it. That being said, Peacock has become the one-stop shop for this kind of reboot, having already picked up new takes on Battlestar Galactica, Queer As Folk, Saved By The Bell, and Clueless—so maybe this makes perfect sense? Peacock has clearly found a lane, much like how Quibi landed on “give a famous person a TV show and maybe it’ll stick” and Apple TV+ went with “We definitely have something, even if you can’t quite come up with it off the top of your head just yet.”
The Variety story doesn’t say who will star in Bel-Air or when it might premiere, but as with literally everything else, it’s not like a whole lot of TV shows are being made right now anyway. Peacock has some time to figure this out.