When it was originally on: 1990-1996

Original network: NBC

Where you can stream it now: Hulu

Had I seen it before: Yes, I’ve seen the pilot and I’ve seen enough episodes in syndication to have a general familiarity with the show, but have never attempted to watch every episode in order.

What IMDb says: After getting into a fight, a streetwise teenager from a poor neighborhood in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is sent by his mother to live with his wealthy aunt, uncle, and cousins at their mansion in Bel-Air, Los Angeles in California.

Why I picked it: I always like making sure I have traditional network sitcoms from all the major networks on the list, and
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is one of the ones that never got its heyday until now because there are too many good ones from NBC.

What I liked: Perhaps the greatest lesson to learn from this pilot is is the most obvious one: have the theme song do 90% of your work for you. Not only does the Fresh Prince theme song help ground anyone who is diving into this show with some other episode besides the pilot, the pilot itself can now skip straight to having fun with its premise since it doesn’t have to spend half of its runtime explaining and establishing its premise.

Most of this episode is all about the obvious fish-out-of-water comedy you’re going to get from taking a kid from the streets and dropping him into this Bel-Air mansion. But there’s also something weirdly relatable about trying to connect with relatives you haven’t seen in a while. I love the joke where Will first meets Carlton and goes “heeeeeyyyy… who is he?” whomst among us hasn’t been at a family reunion or something when we were introduced to a stranger only to realize it was a cousin we hadn’t seen in a while?

I think the show also does a great job of giving the three Banks siblings distinctive personalities in relatively little screen time. Carlton’s going to annoy Will because he’s too much of a square. Hilary is going to annoy Will because she’s too stupid and shallow. Ashley is going to be the young, naive one who looks up to Will and tries to emulate him. This isn’t just there for character development purposes either, all those differences make the show funny in different ways.

I love how well the actual jokes of this hit. Sometimes with sitcoms our ability to understand the humor is contingent on our prior understanding of the characters. Here, the jokes advance our understanding of the characters while making us laugh. The scenes of Hilary talking about taking a bus trip to protest air pollution are great. The scene of Carlton telling us one of his heroes is Bryant Gumbel because he’s “darn good” is funny and tells us a lot about Carlton. I love how we didn’t have to choose between exposition and humor.

And of course the climax where Will accuses Uncle Phil of forgetting where he came from and Uncle Phil putting him in his place is great, surprisingly great for a show that’s so silly for most of the episode. Will Smith and James Avery elevate this to so much more than that the “today I learned _____ ” scene we get between young people and their authority figures at the end of a family sitcom. It makes you realize the show has more ambition beyond just being another funny family sitcom.

What I didn’t like: I’m actually not coming up with much of anything.

Do I want to watch Ep. 2?: On some level yes, because this was a great pilot. But… it also works really well as a standalone piece? Even if I never learned another thing about Will or the Banks family I’d still feel like I had a satisfying, complete story.