WARNING: Spoilers ahead for Bel-Air episode 7!
While the majority of storylines have been changed, reimagining of Fresh Prince isn’t much of a stretch, as the groundwork for such important themes and conversations on Black life in America was already laid in the original series. A few scenes, in particular, from Fresh Prince did effectively drop the humor for an emotionally poignant, dramatic commentary on society’s treatment of Black Americans, and Bel-Air episode 7 was close to recreating one of these moments.
When Will first arrives in Bel-Air, he and Carlton instantly get off on the wrong foot when he sees that Carlton doesn’t quite understand how Black men are typically treated outside of Bel-Air’s privilege. As a wealthy, popular, privileged kid who is one of the only Black men in his Bel-Air community, Carlton is fairly oblivious to the reality of stereotypes and racial profiling that Will has known his entire life. It isn’t until the end of episode 7 that Bel-Air's antagonistic Carlton truly experiences systemic racism first-hand (or at least recognizes it), as he’s nearly arrested when an angry Connor sends the cops to stop the party at the Banks mansion.
When the cops arrive in Bel-Air, a confident Carlton comes downstairs and explains that it’s his house and everything is okay, only for the cops to disregard what he says and tell him to stop in his tracks with his hands up. With the cops continuing to search Carlton and question who the mansion really belonged to, an arrest would have been certain had Lisa not come downstairs with her police chief father on the phone to clear up the situation. This situation functions almost exactly the same as Fresh Prince’s extremely important season 1 episode, “Mistaken Identity,” in which Carlton and Will are pulled over while driving the expensive car of Phil’s colleague to Palm Springs.
At this point in Fresh Prince, Carlton, like the same character in Bel-Air, is largely oblivious to the larger racial profiling and racism on behalf of authorities like the police – he doesn’t believe this would ever happen to him, or thinks the police are "just doing their job." When Carlton is pulled over, the cops believe he stole the car, which Will instantly predicted by telling Carlton that when the police see a young Black man in a nice car, they’ll assume it’s stolen. Will was already aware of this prejudice from his time in West Philly, but this was the first real instance in which Carlton was a victim of racial profiling by the police, leading him to question the system he has previously believed in. The two spent the night in jail until Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv used their legal prowess to prove the boys did nothing wrong, but, of course, the police didn’t listen to them either until Phil’s white legal partner who owned the car arrived.
Had Lisa not been at the party nor her father the chief of police, Bel-Air would have likely repeated Fresh Prince’s groundbreaking episode in which Carlton and Will are incarcerated. Carlton may not have been arrested in Bel-Air, but the incident will now cue into the severity and pervasiveness of racism by police, likely changing his indifference going forward. Fresh Prince’s season 1 episode is what established the show as much more than just a family sitcom, as it outwardly addressed many of the societal issues, particularly institutional racism, that weren’t being talked about on national television at the same caliber in 1990. While Bel-Air season 1 didn’t completely recreate the iconic Fresh Prince episode, a repetition of the racial profiling on behalf of the police just goes to show how little progress has actually been made.
