You THOUGHT your life was terrible until you've seen THIS! :ROLLIN

dcstylez

dcstylez

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Apr 5, 2002
http://www.fmylife.com/
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Originally Posted by DCStylez

Today I found a really funny website call fmylife and its where people do things wrong or something and they post it on fmylife.com and I thought Niketalk might like so I figured I post it there only to find out Im late FML
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Fixed.
 
[h1]'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' Puts Rap in Mainstream[/h1] [h6]By LARRY ROHTER, Special to The New York Times[/h6] [h6]Published: Monday, September 17, 1990[/h6]


It took less than a decade for rap music to push its way off the streets of the South Bronx and become a dominant force in the Top 40. Now, in a programming gamble being watched in network and advertising offices, NBC is about to find out whether the rap, or hip-hop, style can dent the Nielsen ratings.

''Fresh Prince of Bel Air,'' a half-hour situation comedy with the rapper Will Smith in the title role, went on the air on Monday as the most highly touted show of the fall television season. It is an unusual status to be conferred on a new program that is based on an untried premise, leans on associations with a musical genre unknown to many viewers and stars a 21-year-old who never acted before.

The series got off to a solid start with its premiere episode, scoring a 13.6 rating that outpaced CBS's ''Uncle Buck,'' also a new program. But how well ''Fresh Prince'' will really fare will become clear only after full competition resumes today when ABC's ''MacGyver'' returns for the fall. Fox's ''Night at the Movies'' makes its debut later.

Mr. Smith, half of the rap music duo D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, plays a teen-ager from the Philadelphia ghetto who is sent to live with his square and snooty cousins in their Bel Air mansion. There are echoes here, of course, of such hits as''Diff'rent Strokes'' and even ''The Beverly Hillbillies,'' but Mr. Smith and others involved say they are trying to inject some realism and ''another view of the black experience'' to the sitcom formula.

'The Purest Street Awareness'

''The basis of this show is fish out of water,'' said the executive producer, Quincy Jones, the music impresario who has never before put his name on a television series but whose work as producer of Michael Jackson's albums won him respect in Hollywood as a canny judge of public tastes. ''Rap is not the primary focus. If you took the rap out, the premise wouldn't fall apart. But rap gives you the purest street awareness.''

Just how much of rap culture should be grafted onto the comedic is a problem the producers, writers and actors of ''Fresh Prince'' are still trying to solve. Their efforts ever since the head of NBC Entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff, approved the project in April have been aimed at finding a tone that preserves the grittiness of hip-hop without alienating a mass audience expecting laughs.

''When we handed in the first draft of the script, the network freaked out,'' said Susan Borowitz, a veteran of ''Family Ties'' who wrote the pilot episode with her husband, Andy, and produces the show with him. ''They were expecting 'Crocodile Dundee' and 'Beverly Hills Cop' and were quite taken aback by the Malcolm X poster'' that Mr. Smith's character hangs in his bedroom.

The primary focus of the series is not tension between blacks and whites, but the cultural differences and misunderstandings that separate Fresh Prince and the black bourgeoisie, represented by his relatives. Imagine the domestic bliss of the Huxtable family on ''The Cosby Show'' interrupted by a good-natured but coarse and noisy intruder from the streets, and you have ''Fresh Prince'' in a nutshell.

Characters Over Concept

''The concept of this show has been described as slender and slight, and that's true,'' said Mr. Borowitz, who worked at the ''Harvard Lampoon'' with his wife before going on to write for ''Archie Bunker's Place.''. ''This a vehicle to bring the hip-hop sensibility and Will Smith to television. The characters and the actors are more important'' than the concept.

No sooner had NBC added ''Fresh Prince'' to its fall schedule than the rap group 2 Live Crew found itself embroiled in an ugly obscenity controversy that sullied the public image of the entire genre. But the phenomenal success this summer of M. C. Hammer's album ''Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em,'' which has been the most popular recording in the country for 14 consecutive weeks and has sold more than four million copies, suggests that rap music has also found a mass acceptability that augurs well for the series.

''Will is not threatening,'' said a co-producer Benny Medina, who developed the original idea for the series out of his own experience as a black teen-ager from a poor neighborhood who moved in with a Jewish family in Beverly Hills. ''As the show develops, we will start to deal with some of the same things as N.W.A., Public Enemy, Ice Cube and artists with a much more radical way of communicating their life style. But we'll do it Will's way, rather than in their language.''

One initial doubt about the program has already been resolved, however: Mr. Smith not only can sing, write and dance, he clearly can act too. Taping an episode that pairs him with the veteran leading man Richard Roundtree in front of a live audience, Mr. Smith displayed a strong sense of comedic timing, mugged for the camera at will, improvised dialogue with alacrity and, on the few occasions he muffed a line, calmly called out ''Sorry, Mom,'' to his mother, visiting from Philadelphia and watching the performance from the audience.

''It's pretty easy, and not just because I'm basically playing myself,'' Mr. Smith said of his switch from the concert stage to the soundstage. ''With rapping, it's a lot of lines you have to learn anyway. And with a rap performance, I can't just call out for the script if I can't remember a line. If I forget a line, I'm lost. So this is a lot easier.''

Mr. Smith, who is also recording his fourth album, said he expected the series to do well because ''people want to be thrown a bit.'' He professes to be unconcerned should he, Mr. Tartikoff, Mr. Jones and all the others be proven wrong.

''That's not pressure for me,'' Mr. Smith said. ''That's pressure for them. If the show doesn't go well for me, I won't be any worse off. The pressure is on NBC.''

[h6]A version of this article appeared in print on Monday, September 17, 1990, on section C page 17 of the New York edition.[/h6]

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It was great episode, hope this show lasts.
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