Hillman College might be the most vividly realized institution of higher learning that never cashed an actual tuition check. The fictional historically Black college at the heart of A Different World, the generation-defining NBC sitcom that ran for six seasons beginning in 1987, has school colors (maroon and white) and a Latin motto (“Deus nondum te confecit,” or “God is not done with you yet”). It has sports teams, Greek organizations, homecoming traditions. The campus is constantly abuzz, with political debates animating common rooms and flirtations heating up over comfort food at Hillman’s hangout of choice, The Pit. But what really makes the school is its people—Black teens from every conceivable background forging lifelong friendships under the empathetic eyes of adults committed to helping them thrive and mature.
Which is why, even as the TV of the ’80s and ’90s is strip-mined for blandly familiar streaming content, Hillman feels like a place worth revisiting. Also titled A Different World, Netflix’s just-released revival does precisely that in a 10-episode dramedy set among Gen Z freshmen. Yet it also maintains a strong connection to the past, re-enlisting as an executive producer and director Debbie Allen, the architect of the series’ greatness, and making its protagonist the daughter of the opposites-attract golden couple Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley Gilbert-Wayne (Jasmine Guy). The new episodes don’t have quite the same spark of energy and wit that made the original a classic; stylistically, they share more with contemporary teen dramas like the HBCU-set All American: Homecoming and the straight-faced Fresh Prince reboot Bel-Air, whose writer and producer Felicia Pride helms this sequel. But the show does share with its predecessor vibrant characters, appealing performances, and a keen sense of how the personal intersects with the political. It’s more than enough to justify the return trip.
Relatable like her dad, a brilliant mathematician from pre-gentrification Brooklyn, but also entitled like her posh Southern belle mom, Maleah Joi Moon’s Deborah Wayne makes an ideal ingénue, prone to frustrating choices yet still somehow charming. She’s the ultimate Hillman legacy; not only are her parents both grads, but Dwayne is now provost and Whitley (a beauty mogul, to no one’s surprise) is as involved in the alumni scene as you’d expect the namesake of Gilbert Hall to be. So this freshman grew up with campus fixtures like Prof. Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer, reprising her role as Hillman’s resident social justice crusader) and Pit proprietor Nellie Gaines (Famecia Ward, playing the granddaughter of the late Lou Myers’s beloved character, Vernon Gaines). Along with satisfying the nostalgia of longtime fans, these relationships give the show access to the high-stakes higher-ed bureaucracy students rarely glimpse. It’s an effective setup, although a plot that puts the Waynes’ marriage in peril, calling back to their will-they-or-won’t-they courtship, doesn’t feel entirely earned, let alone necessary.
Really, though, the new Different World is about the kids. And that’s as it should be. As with the original cast, the mix of personalities and backstories is key. Deborah has unfinished business—of the romantic sort, naturally—with Shaquille (Cornell Young IV), the football-star son of her dad’s old roommate, smooth schemer Ron Johnson (Darryl M. Bell). Despite being second-generation Hillmanites, neither is sure they truly belong there. Shaquille had Division 1 teams fighting over him but opted to make a statement by playing for an HBCU instead. An aspiring artist whose wild behavior ruined her chances at NYU, Deborah had no alternative.
Her inner circle includes roommate Rashida Duvall (Alijah Kai, another standout), a driven scholarship student who calls herself “the Simone Biles of school” and whose eventual bond with Deborah echoes Whitley’s odd-couple friendship with her own Hillman roommate, Kim (Charnele Brown, who also guest stars). Hazel Henry (Kennedi Reece), whose church-girl innocence belies big ambitions, completes the trio. Among Shaquille’s boys are Kojo Achebe (Chibuikem Uche), whose aspirations of becoming a fashion designer don’t exactly thrill his strict African parents, and Amir Rodale (Jordan Aaron Hall), a formerly incarcerated student whose time in juvie continues to interfere with his life at Hillman. Amir is also the franchise’s first gay main character, an identity that Hall and the writers navigate with grace and ease.
It’s a reverent reinvention, one that the people behind the first Different World clearly support. (Jada Pinkett Smith, Joe Morton, Glynn Turman, and Jenifer Lewis are just a few of the other past stars who appear.) Without defaulting to the Very Special Episodes that worked better in primetime than they do in a binge-dropped streaming season, Pride engages with issues relevant to her young, Black characters, often letting themes develop across episodes. Allen’s groundbreaking storylines about apartheid protests, AIDS, and the censorship of rap lyrics have given way to ones that consider the stigma around learning disabilities, friction between African and Black American cultures, and HBCUs’ reliance on funding from an anti-DEI federal government. In one episode, a bomb threat forces students to realize the school they’d hoped would give them a four-year reprieve from racism is also uniquely vulnerable to it. Yet, true to its history, the show thoughtfully interweaves these topical beats into collegiate lives that revolve around schoolwork, romantic mess, friend-group drama, money troubles, dreams of the future.
The real divergence between the two visions of Hillman is in tone. Once it got past a first season weighed down by its connection, via Lisa Bonet’s original lead, Denise Huxtable, to The Cosby Show and its since-disgraced creator, not to mention the odd gimmick of casting Marisa Tomei as Denise’s white roommate, A Different World was lightning in a bottle. Allen used the jaunty spirit of sitcoms and outsize characters like Whitley and Ron to create 23-minute, multicam stage plays funny, dynamic, and daring enough to make viewers forget that our perspective on Hillman was confined to a handful of dorm-room and common-space interiors. Thanks in part to a talented cast who went on to become fixtures of movies and TV, and in part to the optimism of a post-civil-rights generation that, for all its many challenges, had reason to believe progress would continue, it was possible to spotlight injustice and do pratfalls and lovers’ tiffs in the same scene. Whitley and Dwayne were honeymooning in LA when the Rodney King verdict came down! Roseanne and Tom Arnold, of all people, guest-starred as white looters. (Susan Fales-Hill, then the head writer, has said she thinks the episode sealed the show’s cancellation.)
Pride was probably wise not to try recreating that balance of serious and silly. It might have come off as trivializing to a generation raised amid bigoted, post-Obama backlash and choose-your-own-apocalypse visions of doom within their lifetimes. Even if it didn’t, the multicam sitcom, in its current incarnations as well as its classic ones, reads as a throwback. The decision not to coast on nostalgia, to give viewers access to a fully realized, if somewhat more somber Hillman of classrooms and quads and athletic fields and libraries, is a sound one. More lamentable, yet also understandable, is the extent to which principled preaching, often by respected elders, supplants the hearty debate among characters that once served to underscore the diversity of thought within the Black community. The original series combined an ideal cast with ideal scripts, at precisely the right time to see them embraced by tens of millions of fans. It can’t be reproduced. Thirty-three years later, we have A Different World for a truly different world, though not the one a newly married Dwayne and Whitley might have hoped for.
