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The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: October 16, 1995

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, “The Script Formerly Known As … ” (Season 6, Episode 5) [Watch on Amazon Instant Video]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: I didn’t grow up in a musical-theater household. Don’t blame my parents, they didn’t grow up in musical-theater households either. We didn’t live close enough to New York City to take a quick day trip and get some culture, and as for the prospect of a Gotham vacation, might I refer you to Homer Simpson’s feelings about the city with its pimps and C.H.U.D.s. So when you grow up with no musical-theater presence at home — and with no Broadway-inclined friends at school, thank you very much Irish Catholic repression — you end up culturally illiterate in a way you don’t even realize, and won’t until you’re in your twenties and move to New York and get really into Broadway and then have to explain to your friends how the first and only cast album you ever owned was The Phantom of the Opera.

Which brings us to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Honest, it does! In the show’s sixth season, it delivered an episode that was mostly meant to capitalize on current events like the sensational trials of Heidi Fleiss and especially O.J. Simpson. Uncle Phil (a judge at this point) is overseeing the trial of a showbiz madam, and Will and Hilary (who are running a talk show at this point?) end up mucking things up and getting on Uncle Phil’s bad side even worse than they usually do. By the time we get to Jay Leno making late-night jokes at Uncle Phil’s expense (with the “dancing Phils” an obvious reference to Leno’s infamous Dancing Itos), the rage levels are high enough that Hillary (and the rest of the family) runs for the hills. Not Will, though. Will’s going to patch things up or die trying.

And here’s where it all comes together! Because this dumb episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and it’s delightful dip into queer theatricality was my very first-ever exposure to 1) Dreamgirls, 2) Jennifer Holliday, and 3) “And I Am Telling You” in any capacity. The scales fell from my eyes that day, and I was all the better for it. Sure, it would still be many years before I knew how this song fit into the Broadway ecosystem. I just knew it was over-the-top and I loved it.

So kudos, Will Smith. Which is a really interesting thing to do when talking about stealthing something this gay-adjacent onto network TV. Because two years earlier, the same Will Smith refused to film a scene kissing Anthony Michael Hall in Six Degrees of Separation, and while I didn’t have much of a working knowledge about musical theater, I definitely knew about early-’90s Oscar-nominated movies. Smith’s refusal to play gay in any way that mattered has always stuck in my craw. And yet … he really sells the hell out of Effie’s pain and suffering, don’t he?

[You can watch “The Script Formerly Known As…” on Amazon Instant Video.]

Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.

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