Would you support A Different World KICKSTARTER campaign??? UPDATE: 35 YEAR ANNIVERSARY! NETFLIX REVIVAL!
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
Watch it? Yes. (If it's done really well).
Donate to a Kickstarter? No.
Bottomline:
A Different World 2017 would be a radical departure from the original show. No doubt this new show would focus on and be geared towards: LGBQT characters, SJW's, interracial couples & attracting a "Wider/Whiter audience".
Let's face it; these days, those particular groups are now the target demographics that network shows seem to be marketed towards.
My advice:
Enjoy the original show for what it was, but let it go and move on 'cuz a new version of it (even if it involves the original cast) is sure to disappoint and even piss off hardcore fans...
I just think a reunion movie or maybe a miniseries with the originals...
You've bought back Boy Meets World, Full house...even Roseanne is coming back this fall..
I think Fresh Prince and a different world could do like a reunion movie or something to tie everything up...Do a entire week of that on NBC. Put Seinfeld, Cheers...then do a reunion Movie for a Different world where Rudy would show up or Theo..tie it back to the Cosby Show without bringing up "Dr. Huxtable" because he's toxic right now..
NO!
I loved the original show, but it's time for new ideas. Nostalgia just makes me feel old
I loved the original show, but it's time for new ideas. Nostalgia just makes me feel old
But it was created by Bill Cosby so probably not going to happen.
Not without Kimberly Reese and Dawnn Lewis. And chuck Sinbad dumb ass
Bring back them young guns too. Lena James, Charmaine, Shaza, Colonel Taylor's son and that whole group. That's when the show really was getting hyped
Bring back them young guns too. Lena James, Charmaine, Shaza, Colonel Taylor's son and that whole group. That's when the show really was getting hyped
I would see to have a made for TV movie where Whitley and Dwayne come back from Japan to teach at Hillman.
watching BET marathon all morning...
No one is going to touch it because of Bill Cosby
^^^^^^
it is the EASIEST story
Netflix should ALREADY be on a second season f this idea.
Bounce TV is playing ALL of Cosby's NBC stuff again. If they were really on the come up, they could do something with it. They damn sure playing the shit out of them reruns
Believe me, I would love to see a Different World Reunion of some sort. However, Bounce is probably getting them shows pretty cheap right now. They are probably more willing to play those shows since their programming options are limited, so far. Putting real money into a re-vamped Cosby show is a pretty risky venture. Cosby would have to come out and either sale the rights outright or offer to give all his proceeds from the show to some charity for someone to even consider making a new show.
I would be happy to be wrong in this case, trust me.
Ron had the club. I would be interested to see if he married Freddie. Watching them be parents would be funny. Freddie trying to make the kids be vegan while Ron watches football and eats hot wings.
"A Different World" writer and producer Thad Mumford lit into Lisa Bonet and Debbie Allen in a recent interview with the Archive of American Television. I'm guessing he didn't have a good experience.
- -He starts out saying Lisa Bonet was just no good and only got the show because Bill Cosby kicked her off his show.
-Says she smoked marijuana liked it was going out of style and reeked of patchouli. Knew she was coming because of you could smell her when she was coming.
-Phylicia Rashad was guest starring on the show. During a morning script reading, Lisa "at least was there," was laying her head on the table nodding off to sleep. Phylicia called Bill Cosby and said, "This child is crazy, this child is losing her mind."
-Mentions Lisa getting pregnant and joked maybe Bill did it, "Anything to get her off the show."
-Says Debbie Allen wasn't a good director.
-He and Debbie Allen were always at war for control of the show.
-Debbie Allen has the kids on the show "not speaking English," close to ebonics.
-Bill Cosby complained to him about how the kids were looking on the show, and he told her to talk to Debbie (Including the comment "The darkies look gay.") Bill went to talk to Debbie and nothing was changed. Mumford thinks Bill didn't really care because the show was Camille was the champion of a show about a black college.
-They had some good episodes, but those were the ones Debbie didn't direct. "The shows Debbie didn't do were the best ones."
-Criticized Jasmine Guy's portrayal of Whitley Gilbert saying it was like something from a sketch comedy show.
Quote:
Mumford was a producer and writer of ADW from 1987-1990. He wrote 11 episodes including 6 in the horrible first season with Lisa Bonet.
Debbie Allen directed 83 of the 122 episodes produced in seasons 2-6.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-10-06-ca-4490-story.html
Different Touch to ‘Different World’
By DIANE HAITHMAN
OCT. 6, 1988
12 AM
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Expect a different “A Different World” when the NBC series starts its second season tonight.
Even though the college comedy, a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” was the No. 2 show behind “Cosby” in the Nielsen ratings last season, the producers were unhappy with it, NBC wasn’t satisfied either and TV critics flat out didn’t like it.
The new “A Different World,” which returns at 8:30 p.m., has been completely overhauled. It has a new co-executive producer and director in Debbie Allen, of “Fame” fame. It has the same theme song but a different singer: Aretha Franklin instead of Phoebe Snow. It has a host of new characters and a more adult, realistic approach to college life--all of which the producers hope will win “A Different World” popularity in its own right, not just as the convenient Thursday night bridge between “Cosby” and “Cheers.”
The biggest change in “A Different World,” however, was out of the producers’ control. Lisa Bonet, who starred last season as “Cosby” daughter Denise Huxtable, away from home for the first time at her father’s alma mater, Hillman College, has left the show because she is pregnant.
Bonet will return to “The Cosby Show” tonight as the family’s first college dropout, disguising her pregnancy behind sofas and large grocery bags.
The producers expect that “A Different World” viewers will miss Bonet--who might return to the show after her baby is born--but they remain hopeful that, without her, the series will take on a new ensemble flavor and an identity separate from “Cosby.”
“Whatever it was that was missing from the show last year is now there,” asserts Caryn Mandabach, president of the Carsey-Werner Co., which makes the series for NBC. “It’s just a whole new energy. I think the metaphor that I like to use is that it’s our kitchen, and we’re the cooks, and sometimes it takes a little longer to get it just right.
“What I want now is for people to look at the show and not know what it took for us to get there.”
It took a lot.
This is not the first time the producers of “A Different World” have gone back to the drawing board. Even before the show went on the air last season, it went through numerous changes. Just weeks before its debut, the writing staff was fired, new writers were hired and Anne Beatts, former producer of “Square Pegs,” was brought in to fix up the show in a hurry. The four episodes that already had been completed, which Beatts now derisively calls “The Lost Episodes,” were quickly replaced with new material. One of those shows was scrapped completely; the others were later aired, but buried in the summer schedule “when they (NBC) hoped nobody was watching,” Beatts said.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, actually,” acknowledged Thad Mumford, co-executive producer and head writer on the show, looking back on last season’s woes. Beatts described the first season as “trying to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel while trying to paint the barrel.”
Enter Debbie Allen, a graduate of Washington’s Howard University, who says her experience as a student at a predominantly black university in the politically volatile 1960s could help lend an air of authenticity and topicality to the show.
“You can look at last year as a beginning,” Allen said. “The characters were very well-liked, and they did some good stories. But overall, I think the show was a little bit immature and a little bit naive for college kids.
“So my job has been to spend a lot of time with the writers, giving them ideas that are significant to a group of people who are going to be our next presidential candidates.”
Mumford and other staffers visited Atlanta’s Spelman and Morehouse colleges and Howard University last summer, interviewing students about what they liked and disliked about the show, and observing youthful attitudes, dress and speech.
Allen and Mandabach said that this year’s stories would show students cramming all night for finals, suffering homesickness and loneliness, worrying about money, grades, unwanted pregnancy or world issues instead of clothes and dates.
“The stories have just been rolling off the typewriter once we understood the commitment to the age and the place,” Mandabach said. “I’m so happy we have this landscape, because nobody else is doing it.”
Beatts, who described her departure as a “mutual decision,” expressed surprise when informed that “A Different World” was going topical.
“I suppose that’s an interesting twist,” she said. “It really seemed that last year the push from Carsey-Werner and NBC was to keep it very light. I would have loved to do more controversial shows, but that was the philosophy--just like Cosby didn’t do tough shows, we were to keep it light and comic and youth-oriented.”
Now developing other projects, Beatts guessed that the departure of Bonet “will not hurt them in the least. When I was working on it, people would say to me: ‘It’s good, but why is Lisa Bonet on the show?’ The greater ensemble will make for something more interesting.”
Gauging from studio audience reactions last season, she said, viewers were more enthusiastic about the character of self-styled Southern belle Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy) than they ever were about Bonet--even though at first, Beatts said, she was charged with having “ripped off” the insufferably vain character from CBS’ “Designing Women.”
Whitley will have a roommate this season, Kim Reese (Charnele Brown), a strong-willed pre-med student. Other new characters: Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer), a wide-eyed freshman, moves in with the worldly Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis), who last season shared a room with Bonet and Marisa Tomei (now there are only two in that room); Col. Taylor (Glynn Turman), a hard-nosed math professor whom the students nickname “Dr. War,” and Mr. Gaines (Lou Meyers), the irascible lord of the cafeteria.
Remaining are Whitley and the brainy Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison), along with Tony Award-winner Mary Alice as housemother Lettie Bostic, a role that was recast several times last season. Denise Huxtable’s roommate Maggie (Tomei) has been removed from the cast.
Allen, while stressing that “A Different World” will remain first and foremost a comedy, believes that the political awareness of her own college days is still alive on college campuses in 1988.
“The university situation was a volatile hotbed for changing the world--at least it was while I was in school; we were trying to redefine the system,” she said. “That ability still exists. It has to--or we’re dead.”
Different Touch to ‘Different World’
By DIANE HAITHMAN
OCT. 6, 1988
12 AM
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Expect a different “A Different World” when the NBC series starts its second season tonight.
Even though the college comedy, a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” was the No. 2 show behind “Cosby” in the Nielsen ratings last season, the producers were unhappy with it, NBC wasn’t satisfied either and TV critics flat out didn’t like it.
The new “A Different World,” which returns at 8:30 p.m., has been completely overhauled. It has a new co-executive producer and director in Debbie Allen, of “Fame” fame. It has the same theme song but a different singer: Aretha Franklin instead of Phoebe Snow. It has a host of new characters and a more adult, realistic approach to college life--all of which the producers hope will win “A Different World” popularity in its own right, not just as the convenient Thursday night bridge between “Cosby” and “Cheers.”
The biggest change in “A Different World,” however, was out of the producers’ control. Lisa Bonet, who starred last season as “Cosby” daughter Denise Huxtable, away from home for the first time at her father’s alma mater, Hillman College, has left the show because she is pregnant.
Bonet will return to “The Cosby Show” tonight as the family’s first college dropout, disguising her pregnancy behind sofas and large grocery bags.
The producers expect that “A Different World” viewers will miss Bonet--who might return to the show after her baby is born--but they remain hopeful that, without her, the series will take on a new ensemble flavor and an identity separate from “Cosby.”
“Whatever it was that was missing from the show last year is now there,” asserts Caryn Mandabach, president of the Carsey-Werner Co., which makes the series for NBC. “It’s just a whole new energy. I think the metaphor that I like to use is that it’s our kitchen, and we’re the cooks, and sometimes it takes a little longer to get it just right.
“What I want now is for people to look at the show and not know what it took for us to get there.”
It took a lot.
This is not the first time the producers of “A Different World” have gone back to the drawing board. Even before the show went on the air last season, it went through numerous changes. Just weeks before its debut, the writing staff was fired, new writers were hired and Anne Beatts, former producer of “Square Pegs,” was brought in to fix up the show in a hurry. The four episodes that already had been completed, which Beatts now derisively calls “The Lost Episodes,” were quickly replaced with new material. One of those shows was scrapped completely; the others were later aired, but buried in the summer schedule “when they (NBC) hoped nobody was watching,” Beatts said.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, actually,” acknowledged Thad Mumford, co-executive producer and head writer on the show, looking back on last season’s woes. Beatts described the first season as “trying to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel while trying to paint the barrel.”
Enter Debbie Allen, a graduate of Washington’s Howard University, who says her experience as a student at a predominantly black university in the politically volatile 1960s could help lend an air of authenticity and topicality to the show.
“You can look at last year as a beginning,” Allen said. “The characters were very well-liked, and they did some good stories. But overall, I think the show was a little bit immature and a little bit naive for college kids.
“So my job has been to spend a lot of time with the writers, giving them ideas that are significant to a group of people who are going to be our next presidential candidates.”
Mumford and other staffers visited Atlanta’s Spelman and Morehouse colleges and Howard University last summer, interviewing students about what they liked and disliked about the show, and observing youthful attitudes, dress and speech.
Allen and Mandabach said that this year’s stories would show students cramming all night for finals, suffering homesickness and loneliness, worrying about money, grades, unwanted pregnancy or world issues instead of clothes and dates.
“The stories have just been rolling off the typewriter once we understood the commitment to the age and the place,” Mandabach said. “I’m so happy we have this landscape, because nobody else is doing it.”
Beatts, who described her departure as a “mutual decision,” expressed surprise when informed that “A Different World” was going topical.
“I suppose that’s an interesting twist,” she said. “It really seemed that last year the push from Carsey-Werner and NBC was to keep it very light. I would have loved to do more controversial shows, but that was the philosophy--just like Cosby didn’t do tough shows, we were to keep it light and comic and youth-oriented.”
Now developing other projects, Beatts guessed that the departure of Bonet “will not hurt them in the least. When I was working on it, people would say to me: ‘It’s good, but why is Lisa Bonet on the show?’ The greater ensemble will make for something more interesting.”
Gauging from studio audience reactions last season, she said, viewers were more enthusiastic about the character of self-styled Southern belle Whitley Gilbert (Jasmine Guy) than they ever were about Bonet--even though at first, Beatts said, she was charged with having “ripped off” the insufferably vain character from CBS’ “Designing Women.”
Whitley will have a roommate this season, Kim Reese (Charnele Brown), a strong-willed pre-med student. Other new characters: Freddie Brooks (Cree Summer), a wide-eyed freshman, moves in with the worldly Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis), who last season shared a room with Bonet and Marisa Tomei (now there are only two in that room); Col. Taylor (Glynn Turman), a hard-nosed math professor whom the students nickname “Dr. War,” and Mr. Gaines (Lou Meyers), the irascible lord of the cafeteria.
Remaining are Whitley and the brainy Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison), along with Tony Award-winner Mary Alice as housemother Lettie Bostic, a role that was recast several times last season. Denise Huxtable’s roommate Maggie (Tomei) has been removed from the cast.
Allen, while stressing that “A Different World” will remain first and foremost a comedy, believes that the political awareness of her own college days is still alive on college campuses in 1988.
“The university situation was a volatile hotbed for changing the world--at least it was while I was in school; we were trying to redefine the system,” she said. “That ability still exists. It has to--or we’re dead.”
This makes absolutely no sense...I believe ratings actually went up during the second season after Lisa Bonet and Debbie took over the show..there wasn't as much crossover(Cosby Show and ADW) after Lisa left the show though..Clair went back a few times but that was it
I was thinking the same thing. It tackled more serious subjects and got funnier. Plus "speaking ebonics" is silly. They spoke the way young black people spoke because that's who it was marketed to and that's probably who they were.
Forgotten History: Spike Lee Says Bill Cosby Stole 'A Different World' From 'School Daze'
https://www.bgol.us/forum/threads/would-you-support-a-a-different-world-kickstarter-campaign.757286/
www.bgol.us
14 Facts About <em>A Different World</em>
The original premise was completely different.
www.mentalfloss.com
'A Different World': Where Are They Now?
We check in on the cast of the 1987 sitcom spin-off.