When Morgan Cooper learned that Will Smith wanted to talk to him in 2019, the young filmmaker thought he was going to get served with a legal notice. Less than 24 hours earlier, Cooper’s mock trailer, which flipped-turned Smith’s hit ’90s sitcom “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” into a gritty, premium cable drama, went viral on YouTube.
“It was under 24 hours before Will’s company Westbrook reached out and they said that they wanted to meet in Calabasas the next day,” Cooper told TheWrap. “I didn’t know if it was going to be a cease and desist or what it was going to be.”
Smith, who FaceTimed into that meeting from Miami, where he was shooting “Bad Boys III,” assured Cooper that he was not in trouble — in fact, the star was transfixed by Cooper’s idea to turn his old sitcom into a more serious drama. “He asked me on that call: What do you want to do with it?” Cooper recalled. “I gave him a quick pitch of the vision for the show. And two weeks later, we were down in Miami, and we were talking about what this would look like, and by the end of the trip, we shook hands and were in business together.”
On Sunday, what was initially just a thought exercise debuts on Peacock as the best shot for NBCUniversal’s flailing streaming service to build itself an elusive breakout hit. “Bel-Air” will debut its first three episodes ahead of Peacock’s stream of NBC’s Super Bowl LVI broadcast.
Despite being barely 18 months old, Peacock is finding itself at a crossroads after losing $1.7 billion in 2021. Even worse: Comcast’s CFO Mike Cavanagh predicted a $2.5 billion loss this year. The service lost $663 million in 2020, though it wasn’t available the entire year.
Some of the increased losses is due to the fact that NBCU will double its content spend to $3 billion in 2022, with the eventual goal of reaching $5 billion annually “over the next couple of years,” according to Cavanagh. Peacock initially expected to be profitable by 2025, but executives have since admitted that they may have to push that goal back by a year or two.
Last month, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts revealed that the service, which rolled out in July 2020, has just over 9 million paying customers — out of 24.5 million monthly active accounts. The streaming service earns a little less than $10 monthly per paid subscriber, including advertising, he added. We’ll save you the math: That’s $90 million per month that the company earns from Peacock in subscription and advertising revenue. And the annual total — $1.1 billion — is far, far short of the ever-growing spend on content.
Worse for NBCU, that 24.5 million active account figure is boosted by 7 million subscribers to Comcast’s Xfinity digital cable package as well as millions of others who watch programming on the service’s free, ad-supported tier.
The upstart streamer trails far behind its competitors. Netflix has nearly 222 million subscribers (74 million of them in the U.S. and Canada), Disney+ has 118 million global subs through the first three quarters of 2021. HBO Max boasts 74 million global subs, including 47 million in the U.S. It’s hard to parse how many of ViacomCBS’ total subscriber count of 47 million belong to Paramount+, but it’s a sizable number (the company’s subscriber count includes Showtime and BET+).
Like all of its streaming competitors, Peacock has been turning to established IP. “The Fresh Prince,” which aired on NBC in the early ’90s, is best known for launching Will Smith’s career and was groundbreaking at the time for being a network TV show featuring a predominantly Black cast and a story centered around Black wealth. The show has been in syndication since 1994 (it went off the air in 1996). A reunion special streamed on HBO Max last year.
Unlike its prior attempts to reboot old sitcoms like “Saved by the Bell” and “Punky Brewster,” Peacock is stretching the bounds of what it means to “re-imagine” a classic story with “Bel-Air.”
True to Cooper’s viral sensation, the new show swaps out Smith’s slapstick physical comedy for a much more grounded story that genuinely asks the question: What would it really be like if a Black kid from the West Philadelphia projects was uprooted to the gated fences of Los Angeles’ glitzy Bel-Air?
T.J. Brady, who showruns the series alongside Rasheed Newson, said the concept wouldn’t have worked without getting the buy-in from Smith, who serves as an executive producer on the series. That was especially true of the casting of Jabari Banks as “Bel-Air’s” version of Will. “His endorsement of that vision meant that it was going to be the vision,” Brady said. “It was going to be the heart and soul of what people saw in that online trailer, brought to a much bigger scale because of Will’s support.”
Newson said he was relieved that Smith fully endorsed the grittier approach to his old character. “He has veto power, should he choose to use it. But I’m happy to report he never did that,” he said. “Many television shows are sold on based on a vision that then gets retooled beyond recognition. That didn’t happen here.”
The idea of rebooting a beloved sitcom as a gritty drama is ripe for parody. In fact, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” recently mocked the retooling of “Bel-Air” with its own sketch imaging a gritty redo of “Family Matters” called “Urkel.” But to Brady and Newson, the fish-out-of-water story at the heart of “Fresh Prince” feels more authentic in a dramatic telling. “Some of the things that the American public at large was laughing at during those times aren’t as funny anymore,” Brady said. “Some of the themes they explored and didn’t get into as much — everything from Will and Carlton being thrown into jail — it’s really not that funny anymore.”
Newson added that even if they had fully rebooted “Fresh Prince” as a 2022 sitcom, it would look markedly different from the one that ran on NBC for six seasons. “You can’t gloss over some of those issues the way you used to and in a half-hour sitcom,” he said. “Half of the great half-hour sitcoms now don’t do that. You have to explore it once you present it.”