WARNING: Spoilers for Bel-Air season 1, episode 9!
Lisa and Fred Wilkes, Will’s father, Geoffrey’s son, Judge Roberston, and even nods to Jackie being included in Bel-Air season 1, it appears every prominent figure from the original series will return in the reboot, though possibly with one major exception.
With the new dramatization of Fresh Prince’s iconic characters, many figures have been excluded from the reboot or have had their sitcom personalities adjusted. Jazz is no longer Will’s goofy friend who incessantly pesters Hilary, Aunt Viv is now a career-oriented artist, Geoffrey is a much more suave employee of Philip Banks, and Fred Wilkes has been set up as Bel-Air season 1’s main antagonist. In changing the trajectories of the core characters, Bel-Air hints that a figure from Fresh Prince’s later seasons won’t appear in the new show.
It seems that Bel-Air’s future seasons will be missing Nicky Banks, the youngest child of Bel-Air's Aunt Viv with an unplanned pregnancy. This isn’t to say that she couldn’t still be a new parent and successful artist, but that introducing Nicky would complicate her ease of mind in launching back into her career, especially since Bel-Air already established that the initial reason for her 20-year artist hiatus was due to her family obligations.
Nicky Banks not existing in Bel-Air’s reboot still makes sense for the larger picture, particularly because he was never even part of Fresh Prince’s original plan. Nicky was only written into Fresh Prince once the original Aunt Viv actress, Janet Hubert, became pregnant in real life. Even though the original Aunt Viv would be recast in season 4 with actress Daphne Maxwell Reid, Fresh Prince still had to feature Hubert’s pregnancy in season 3, which meant rerouting the future of the show to include the Banks’ young child.
Nicky’s character clearly became a complicated subject for Fresh Prince seasons 4 through 6, as the youngest Banks child was an infant in season 4 until he was magically aged into a preschooler for the season 5 premiere. In an attempt to avoid dealing with the same narrative difficulties, Bel-Air may be writing Nicky out entirely. Since Aunt Viv didn’t become pregnant until Fresh Prince season 3, it’s still possible that Bel-Air could write in Nicky for the future of the show, but change the circumstances of his role within the Banks family. Perhaps Nicky is a young child that the Banks adopt into their home, but it seems unlikely that Bel-Air's modern reboot will repeat the route of Aunt Viv and Uncle Phil having an unexpected pregnancy.
