Now, this is a story all about how people continue to have a strong, marketable connection to the sitcom that first made Will Smith a household name, 20 years after the program went off the air. (With many fans reporting that that the show’s charismatic star and willingness to indulge in realistic emotional drama left them feeling flipped, or possibly turned.) So now, we’d like to take a minute—please, take a break, rest your feet, grab a chair—and talk about how Will Smith is working on a revival of a show called The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.
TV Line is reporting that Smith’s production shingle, Overbrook Entertainment, is in tentative talks to develop a reboot of the show, which ran for six seasons on NBC and has been a mainstay of syndication packages ever since. The new version of the show would put “a new spin on the fish-out-of-water tale while maintaining the spirit of the original series,” which presumably translates into, “We can probably get the rights to use ‘It’s Not Unusual’ again.”
The pitch is reportedly still in very early stages, so it’s not entirely clear whether the new show would be a full reboot, disconnected from the original, or if it’ll be positioned as a sequel series, a la Girl Meets World or Fuller House. Although James Avery, who played top-tier TV dad Uncle Phil in the original show, died in 2013, the rest of the show’s cast—including both Aunts Viv, and a 50-year-old-but-still-aerodynamically-fit DJ Jazzy Jeff—are still around to provide the requisite cameo duty if that’s the route Smith ends up taking.