After 38 years since NBC’s “A Different World” premiered, the show’s cultural impact still runs deep. Watching the iconic all-black cast share their HBCU college experience helped reshape how audiences imagined Black excellence on screen.
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But what if we told you that the cast that we know and love was originally supposed to be about the white students’ experience? Sounds wild, right? Well, here’s how that almost happened.
“A Different World”, produced by Bill Cosby, premiered on Sept. 24, 1987, as the spinoff of the legendary show, “The Cosby Show.” Lisa Bonet, who portrayed Cliff and Claire Huxtable’s second-eldest child, Denise, was intended to continue her story as she navigated life at the fictional Hillman College.
So, why does this matter now? Following the recent online hoopla over Keke Palmer’s “Southern Fried Rice” trailer, a show concept about an Asian-American girl attending an HBCU, social media dragged Palmer across every corner of the internet. Even with some people calling it “tone deaf.”
One X user made an interesting connection that we missed:
One user commented, “The issue with Keke Palmer’s show is who the audience is she is trying to market to. Is it the non black fans? Or is it for your core audience?”
That question led us down a research rabbit hole that revealed “A Different World” nearly had a similar issue, centering whiteness in a story about Black culture.
Longtime fans of “The Cosby Show” were drawn to Denise Huxtable’s “wild-child” character, who served as the anchor for a spinoff. But according to Today, the original idea for the show didn’t even involve Denise in the starring role. In the early stages of development, NBC executives envisioned a show about a white student attending a predominantly Black college.
Sounds like a concept we recently heard about, right?
Jay Sandrich, an acclaimed television director who helmed the pilot episode, revealed in a 2001 interview with the Television Academy Foundation that Cosby’s initial pitch centered on a white student at an HBCU, with Lisa Bonet cast as her roommate.
“We had preliminary casting,” Sandrich said. “And the casting director sent a girl from Los Angeles to meet us, who was going to be the roommate. The script hadn’t been written yet. And we met with her, and we all fell in love with her because her name was Meg Ryan.”
That’s right: Famed 1990s actress Meg Ryan was supposed to attend Hillman to study in Lena Horne’s acting class.
At the time, Ryan was the supporting actress in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun. But as her film career took off, her agents pulled her from the show to focus on movies instead of television.
Following the original plan, young actress Marisa Tomai stepped in to fill the role. However, Horne didn’t join the show, and its focus shifted to Denise Huxtable.
In the first season, “A Different World” spotlighted Denise, Maggie Lauten(portrayed by Marisa Tomei), and Jaleesa (portrayed by Dawnn Lewis) as college roommates. But after the season, Bonet shared this news with Cosby and fellow producer Debbie Allen about her pregnancy with her then-husband, Lenny Kravitz, who together welcomed daughter Zoe Kravitz in December 1988.
After Bonet’s departure, the storylines for their upcoming season were impacted. Allen still wanted to use Tomei with a planned storyline of exploring interracial dating between her character, Maggie, and a Black character on the show.
During a 2006 Television Critics Association panel, Allen shared her thoughts about Tomei’s potential storyline. “I thought that she (Maggie) and Dwayne Wayne (played by Kadeem Hardison) would be friends.” She envisioned a Thanksgiving episode where Maggie visited Dwayne’s family, highlighting the discomfort around interracial relationships and racism. But NBC executives resisted the direction, and Tomei was written off after the first season.
After this viral TikTok video resurfaced history, social media sounded off in the comments:
“Imagine having all these black characters but the story is focused on the one white girl,” an Instagram user wrote.
“Debbie Allen saved that show,” one TikTok user wrote.
Another one summed it best, saying, “Thank God we got ‘A Different World’ we deserved. It was a cultural revolution for us.”
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