What Season Does Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air "Fall Off"?

DaMos Supreme

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Looking back I just :russ: at the arrogance and dismissive nature of certain sitcoms. Like with FPOBA we are supposed to forget Lisa existed even though she was added to the show to indicate Will maturing. Will had no let down except becoming more of a nuisance and becoming more immature. But since she wasn’t a main character, just disregard her existence.

Family Matters completely offered no explanation of the disappearance of Judy Winslow and essentially told us ‘Ah, forget about her, just focus on Urkel and his lovable ineptness’.
 

DamienWayne

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Looking back I just :russ: at the arrogance and dismissive nature of certain sitcoms. Like with FPOBA we are supposed to forget Lisa existed even though she was added to the show to indicate Will maturing. Will had no let down except becoming more of a nuisance and becoming more immature. But since she wasn’t a main character, just disregard her existence.

Family Matters completely offered no explanation of the disappearance of Judy Winslow and essentially told us ‘Ah, forget about her, just focus on Urkel and his lovable ineptness’.



judy was forgivable , plus the addition of lil richie , the other kids going thru pubery/ end of a season , plus it was the early years of the show and family matters as a whole was loosely in order. u didnt have to see the previous episode to know what was going on


will and lisa is unforgivable , that WHOLE season was built around their wedding and episodes of them doing shyt, couples counseling, getting cool with her pops, (john amos) , the bachelorette party. not mentioning it ever again was a spit in the face of the fans. ( we gonna talk about when lisa was played by cree summers and her pops was john witherspoon?)
 

Mike the Executioner

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Ehhh related to fresh prince



That excerpt doesn't make Will look good for the most part.

Also, I'm glad I got confirmation that Will was improvising his lines. It's especially noticeable in the later seasons that he's coming up with his own material and controlling the rhythm of the scene when he's on camera.
 

Mike the Executioner

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He went from being treated like a distant relative, to having a symbiotic relationship, then being look at like one of the kids, and lastly, becoming a bit parasitic and annoying, although still lovable by the fam. Everyone moved on with what appeared to be promising futures, while he’s more lost than he was at 16/17. You can tell they were just going through the motions with the ramped up guest appearances and Will basically turning into Dennis the Menace infused with DNA from Martin.

This is the thing that no longer makes sense to me. Will had a lot of creative control, more than most sitcom actors get. By the last season, he was an executive producer like Seinfeld and Martin. It makes me wonder why he chose to portray his character like an idiot. Maybe he thought it was funnier?

I've read about that but there's no actual source for it. And in Karyn Parsons' interview with Vlad she said she never heard anything about them being cancelled during or after season 4 when he brought it up so I think it's just one of those message board :duck:'s that two-bit clickbait writers picked up on.

Yeah, it was Will's decision to end the series. Halfway through season five, he sat everyone down and told them season six would be the last one. He told them in advance so everybody had enough time to find new jobs.

Apparently, when John Amos guest starred, they had a conversation and it made Will realize that the show shouldn't overstay its welcome. He also believes the stories were starting to get more hokey around this time and the show officially jumped the shark with "Bullets over Bel-Air."
 

DaMos Supreme

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This is the thing that no longer makes sense to me. Will had a lot of creative control, more than most sitcom actors get. By the last season, he was an executive producer like Seinfeld and Martin. It makes me wonder why he chose to portray his character like an idiot. Maybe he thought it was funnier?



Yeah, it was Will's decision to end the series. Halfway through season five, he sat everyone down and told them season six would be the last one. He told them in advance so everybody had enough time to find new jobs.

Apparently, when John Amos guest starred, they had a conversation and it made Will realize that the show shouldn't overstay its welcome. He also believes the stories were starting to get more hokey around this time and the show officially jumped the shark with "Bullets over Bel-Air."
I always assumed Will just wanted to focus more on movies, especially making blockbusters, and kind of outgrown the sitcom venue. In hindsight, I had no qualms with him wanting to end the series in season six, I felt the execution left a lot be desired (The way the Lisa situation ended was very mediocre to put it nicely).

I don’t know if Will watched way too many Martin episodes or, even low-key, the Wayans Bros and felt like he needed to ramp up the goofiness and mischievousness.
 
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I wouldn’t say it fell off, but looking at it now from an older perspective, the idea that Will, who was a ladies man decides he wants to get married before he graduated college, and had time to experience life is crazy to me.
 
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This is the thing that no longer makes sense to me. Will had a lot of creative control, more than most sitcom actors get. By the last season, he was an executive producer like Seinfeld and Martin. It makes me wonder why he chose to portray his character like an idiot. Maybe he thought it was funnier?



Yeah, it was Will's decision to end the series. Halfway through season five, he sat everyone down and told them season six would be the last one. He told them in advance so everybody had enough time to find new jobs.

Apparently, when John Amos guest starred, they had a conversation and it made Will realize that the show shouldn't overstay its welcome. He also believes the stories were starting to get more hokey around this time and the show officially jumped the shark with "Bullets over Bel-Air."


Your right about everything but I don’t think it was John Amos he had the convo with it was Sherman Hemsley who told Will that he didn’t know that the Jefferson’s had been cancelled until he showed up for work one day and his parking spot had been taken.


I also think Will was pretty burnt out over the series and kind of over it which is why Season 6 is such a step backwards for his character in particular, he was phoning it in. He’s said that after doing the film Six Degrees Of Separation it was hard for him to go back to doing comedy and that that experience really changed him as an actor.


I still say Fresh Prince is a perfect series right up to the wedding episode. After that its cool here and there and the finale is still one of the best in all of sitcoms but it never reached the highs of seasons 1-4 again
 

FunkDoc1112

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Your right about everything but I don’t think it was John Amos he had the convo with it was Sherman Hemsley who told Will that he didn’t know that the Jefferson’s had been cancelled until he showed up for work one day and his parking spot had been taken.


I also think Will was pretty burnt out over the series and kind of over it which is why Season 6 is such a step backwards for his character in particular, he was phoning it in. He’s said that after doing the film Six Degrees Of Separation it was hard for him to go back to doing comedy and that that experience really changed him as an actor.


I still say Fresh Prince is a perfect series right up to the wedding episode. After that its cool here and there and the finale is still one of the best in all of sitcoms but it never reached the highs of seasons 1-4 again
I think season 5 is when they first started falling into some of the interchangable cliche sitcom plotlines that you always see like "Private school family inspection!" and "Cast show-off becomes a pop star and falls off all in the span of a week!" and "Couples counseling for the wedding and suddenly they start arguing about everything!" and so-on but it was still solid. But then season 6 the wheels fell off.
 
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