Campus show

"A, Different World" a spin-off from the smash hit "Cosby Show" which had Huxtable daughter Denise (Lisa Bonet) off to college to find out a different world laid ahead. Denise dropped out of the mostly black college only to have the series improve and become a hit with other cast members. The best characters had to be the uppity Whitley (Jasmine Guy), and the well liked and super-cool math major Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) along with his best friend Ron (Darryl M. Bell). The pit was the place the gang hung out for everything from meals to talk. The theme song sung by Phoebe Snow really is the truth once you leave home from your parents it really is a different world.

Most people remember this show as the spinoff of The Cosby Show built around Lisa Bonet's Denise character. After she (and Marisa Tomei) left the show, it was generally dismissed as a failure that was left on the air because of Cosby's influence. Oddly enough, it was at that point that this series got interesting. The "traditionally black college" setting provided a unique forum for exploring the topics that have arisen at the cultural crossroads that is Modern America. Metaracial politics informed both explicitly sociological stories and more traditional sitcom plots. It finally became the show they had probably intended to produce in the first place. That's not to say that "A Different World" became the greatest show in the history of Television. It never managed to settle on who the main characters were. The romance of Whitley and Dwayne was probably most prominent, but Ron, Freddie, Jaleesa, Kimberly, and, eventually, another generation of students took center stage from time to time too. I think medical student Kimberly best embodied the "entry point" or audience viewpoint. She was the character most likely to balance the materialism of Whitley, activist politics of Freddie, and more personal concerns of the other characters and achieve some kind of moral synthesis which the producers seemed to be aiming for.

I must admit that A DIFFERENT WORLD started relatively bland and humourless, mainly because the producers were trying to make a predominantly black college experience acceptable to a "mainstream" audience.

After the first year when Lisa Bonet left and Debbie Allen came along and took over the producing duties, A DIFFERENT WORLD changed to become a lot more timely and much more relevant for the time -- especially dealing with subjects like sexism, rape, South Africa, drug abuse, and all of the other issues faced on college campuses. In later seasons, when the original cast grew up, did we see a lot of long term character development and the show has never been properly credited for being what it was: the first and only show ever to deal with black people in college. A DIFFERENT WORLD isn't always uproaringly funny, but watching it in repeats as an adult, I can see what the show was going for, it was literally a slice of life show, not really fulfilling the sit-com requirement of a joke a minute. You had characters who dealt with being young adults and made bad decisions and then sometimes dealt with the consequences. It was a good show that requires frequent viewings. Those who remember a classic episode where Dean Cain plays a racist will know how good of an actor he can be.

I wish the second season would hurry up and come out. I loved the Special Feature when all of the cast talked about how the show improved. Even when the show was a little goofier, who didn't think Lisa Bonet looked adorable in her pig snout. I started a petition to get the second season out there. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do it. I like to watch people that are my age get to experience the college life, going to an HBCU, pledging, loving, befriending, and just hanging out. I wanted to go to an HBCU as soon as I saw "A Different World" and I actually created my book, Change for a Twenty, around the college crowd. I just think it's so commendable when black people can be on a show without a bunch of stereotypes. It gave other young people someone to model their character on.

After a very rocky first season, this show not only went on to become an accurate portrayal of the Black college experience, it was also an accurate portrayal of college life in general. This show is one of the exceptions to the rule that drastic changes ruin great series. During the first season, it became obvious that Lisa Bonet couldn't carry the show and that the real star of the show was Jasmine Guy, whose character of Whitley Gilbert will always be remembered as one of the all time greats. Also, even though the show was set in a college, you never saw the kids actually attending class. All this changed during the second season when both Bonet's character of Denise Huxtable and Marissa Tomei's character of Maggie were written off the show and were replaced by Freddie, played by Cree Summer, and Kim, played by Charnele Brown. But perhaps the big change was that not only did you see the kids attending classes, but the show became more issue oriented. Issues like date rape, AIDS, domestic violence, apartheid and teen pregnancy were all covered in this show and helped to make it more than a "Cosby Show" spin-off. Also, besides the above mentioned characters, Kadeem Hardison's portrayal of Dwayne Wayne helped make this show great.