'A Different World' spends too much time mining nostalgia

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Edited by Steve Reiss

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Recently, critic Taylor Crumpton found herself on the nasty end of a social media dogpile for a review she wrote largely panning Netflix’s reboot of A Different World, the much-loved sitcom that followed Denise Huxtable of The Cosby Show to a fictional Richmond, Virginia HBCU called Hillman College. 

The new World returns to Hillman, centering on the modern day obstacles facing Deborah Wayne (Tony winner Maleah Joi Moon), the youngest daughter of Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison) and Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy). Deborah (pronounced De-BOR-ah, with three distinct syllables) enters her freshman year as Hillman’s most notorious nepo baby. Her father, who was serving as provost, quickly gets promoted to interim president when his predecessor is caught embezzling funds. Whitley, meanwhile, is a successful beauty mogul who has made so much money that she financed the renovation of her daughter’s dorm, now named Whitley Gilbert Hall. 

The reboot is clearly set in a Trumpian America, though the president’s administration remains a nebulous, unnamed villain. Hillman faces existential troubles in the form of severe federal budget cuts that are somehow magically resolved at the season’s end thanks to a senator and a congresswoman who are Hillman alumni. A Different World closes with an ICE agent demanding that two foreign students produce their papers. But overall, A Different World feels sweetly anodyne, even patronizing, toward student radicalism, especially when it makes Deborah its chief organizer.

The show’s first 10-episode season has been in Netflix’s Top 10 carousel of shows streamed in the United States since it debuted September 24. UPDATE: Netflix renewed A Different World for a second season, 8 days after its debut, Deadline reported.

I found the reboot’s directorial style and its pacing muddled, though it grows more confident in the latter half of the season. Most of its new central characters feel less developed than their 1987 predecessors. The breakout exception is Amir (Jordan Aaron Hall), a queer freshman who is trying to rebuild his life after having to defer enrollment because he was arrested and spent a year in juvenile hall. In Hall’s hands, Amir is a witty, well-rounded charmer of a character, comfortable with himself and his queerness, and practiced in the art of advocating for himself, too. His mouthy advocacy is valuable, as Amir spends his first year struggling to obtain student housing. 

“What irks me about this reboot is the current crop of young Black executives and creatives in Hollywood are so adamant about working with living legends or making glorified fan fictions with an existing IP, that a new story cannot be told,” Taylor texted me. “It’s stifling of a radical Black imaginary future,” Crumpton continued. “In the light of all the college activists who have been expelled or facing charges from the government, it’s weird for a show to highlight defunding of HBCUs but never explicitly state Trump or the education secretary by name.”