Six years ago, Morgan Stevenson Cooper, a self-taught filmmaker, was shooting videos around his hometown, Kansas City, Mo., when he directed a short that reimagined the ’90s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” as a gritty dramatic feature. Shot on a budget of $25,000 when Cooper was 25, the video quickly went viral on YouTube and eventually attracted the attention of the original Fresh Prince himself, Will Smith, who reached out to Cooper about the possibility of turning his mock trailer — by then something of a real trailer — into a TV series.
The result was “Bel-Air,” which premiered on Peacock in 2022. A family drama full of teenagers facing (mostly) realistic dilemmas, it illuminated just how fraught the sitcom’s supposedly comic fish-out-of-water setup was: A Black teen is yanked from his home in West Philadelphia and transported to a wealthy, white enclave on the other side of the country. What could go wrong?
In “Bel-Air,” Will (Jabari Banks) wrestles with racist schoolmates and issues with his father (Marlon Wayans), who is back in his life after being released from prison. Will’s cousin Carlton (Olly Sholotan) is a much darker and more conflicted character than the original played by Alfonso Ribeiro (and largely sans the trademark “Carlton” dance). “Bel Air” became the most-streamed of Peacock’s relatively small inventory of original series — the streamer declined to give audience numbers — and has received 14 N.A.A.C.P. Image Award nominations, winning three times.
The show’s fourth and final season is now streaming, with the kids, seniors at Bel-Air Academy, facing homecoming week, college apps, life after drug rehab (Carlton) and the aftermath of a kidnapping (Will). Cooper, who developed the show with Malcolm Spellman, TJ Brady and Rasheed Newson, directed the final two episodes. (The series finale premieres on Monday.) He is currently busy with assorted projects he can’t say much about (a hip-hop biopic set in the ’90s; a half-hour comedy set in the sports world), and last month, he published a children’s book, “I Can Make A Movie!” It is loosely based on Cooper’s experiences making short films and music videos with local actors on shoestring budgets in Kansas City.
On a recent morning, in a coffee shop in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, Cooper looked back on the low-budget video that started it all and shared his thoughts about the real Bel-Air. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
“Bel-Air” wraps up next week. What were your goals for this final season?
We wanted to end strong. You know how some shows, when they end, they kind of wilt? You watch that last episode, and you’re like, “Thank God this is off the air.” When people watch this finale, I think they’re going to be like, “No, we want more!”
Plenty has happened since your original “Bel-Air” video. What were your hopes for that when you were making it?
We actually shot enough footage to make a feature film. That original short film is, like, three and a half minutes, but we used only maybe 10 percent of what we shot.
So you were thinking it could be a movie.
Yeah, absolutely. But then I was like, “No, this is actually supposed to be a one-hour drama.” There are too many stories. It’s too big of an ensemble.
And then Will Smith called.
You never know how people are going to respond, so when he reached out I was like, “Wow, I trusted my gut, and my gut was right.” He said they had been trying to find their way back into “Fresh Prince” for decades, and they couldn’t crack it.
They had probably been thinking about comedies.
Yeah, they were thinking of sequels. “Fresh Princess.” An animated thing. All kinds of things.
What if instead Smith had come out and said, “I hate this”?
That would have been OK. I think anything that elicits a response one way or another is important. Some of the art I love is the most polarizing. Like Caravaggio, a big influence of mine. I love his style of lighting. “Painterly” is the word I used when I was prepping the pilot with our cinematographer and gaffer. It wasn’t like, “Yo, let’s just turn on some lights and get exposure.” It was like, “No, we have to sculpt light.”
Were there people who said, “Why would you do this to my beloved show?”
Yeah, early on I got feedback like, “That’s not my ‘Fresh Prince’!” But then people started to feel connected to the show. Now “Bel-Air” fans tell me they don’t really even connect it with “The Fresh Prince.” It’s its own thing. That was always the goal: to create something that can stand on its own.
The show is based in Bel-Air, of course, and the Will character is from Philadelphia. But you’re from Kansas City. Did your experiences growing up there inform the show?
Absolutely. I look for pieces of my life in every character. With Will, for example, and that inciting incident on the basketball court — growing up playing basketball in Kansas City you saw fights, and you saw escalation, and you saw male ego. So a lot of that went into creating that sequence. Or when I saw Carlton navigating being in spaces where people don’t look like him, I thought about shooting commercials and oftentimes being the only Black person in the room.
In “Fresh Prince,” Will was the fish out of water. But in your show, Carlton is even more so in many ways, even though Bel-Air is his home.
He is in the water; he just doesn’t look like the other fishes.
Last season, we saw Carlton coming out of rehab after having admitted his addiction at the end of Season 2. Did you ever wonder if the show was taking things too far and getting too dark?
I pitched Geoffrey [the family’s “house manager” and sometime enforcer] dying at the end of Season 2. [Other executive producers] thought that was too far. Jimmy Akingbola, who plays Geoffrey, he’s a fan favorite, and so they were not going for that.
Your show was spoofed on “Saturday Night Live,” with a mock trailer of a “Family Matters” reboot that had Steve Urkel pummeling a guy and saying “Did I do that?”
I loved that. All my friends were sending that clip to me. I love my art, but, at the same time, I’m cool with being spoofed. I’m cool with looking silly.
What would you have done if some producer had said: “Hey, this guy’s ‘Bel-Air’ was a hit. Let’s see what he can do with Urkel”?
You know what’s interesting? I hate reboots. I don’t watch them. They’re born in the C-suite where they say: “What I.P. can we exploit today? Let’s find a writer.” “Bel-Air” was born from an idea I had driving in my car.
When you moved to Southern California from Kansas City to do the show, did you ever think you might want to live in the actual Bel-Air?
Hell no. I don’t want to use the word “creepy,” but if a country club were a community, it would be Bel-Air. That’s the vibe. Spending a little time over there, you’re wondering what would it be like living there, especially as a Black family.
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