Mike the Executioner
What went on up there? Poppers and weird sex!
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.
Yeah, when the show was ending, Will was interviewed by......the L.A. Times, I think? He compared television to being on the bench and movies to having a starting spot in the lineup. He had been training for years, but now, he was ready for the coach to put him in the game. I think he made the right decision ending the series after six seasons. If it had lasted longer, we would have ended up getting some awful episodes, and the characters would have become parodies of themselves.
And yes, Will was definitely watching Martin. I think them working on Bad Boys together influenced his acting style on the show because his performances became bigger and bigger. Him serenading Uncle Phil with Dreamgirls is something that would have never happened in the earlier seasons. It's almost like the writers had no idea how to end that episode, so they just told Will to figure it out on his own.
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 remember him mentioning it being John Amos in his book, but it could have also been Sherman since they both guest starred that season. I can also see Will trying to avoid that Jeffersons cancellation because that's probably the most disrespectful way to end a long-running show. How do you let the actors find out through the newspaper?
Yeah, he mentioned that when season four started, he didn't feel like he was the same comedically because of Six Degrees, so the writers shifted focus to Carlton for the first couple episodes. It wasn't until the episode where he was trying to get Hilary to date his teacher and he did the whole "Dum Dum Didday" scene that he felt like he was funny again. This is just my theory, but I feel like as the show went on, Will had to think more and more about how to be Will Smith (the character). It didn't come as easy to him as in the earlier seasons, so he compensated for it with the improvising and the Eminem-style performances.
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.
To me, Fresh Prince never reaches that point where it becomes unwatchable. The first four seasons are perfect, and the last two seasons are good for the most part, with great stuff in isolation. Season six has "Get a Job" at least. But yeah, the shift started happening in season five. The episodes with Ashley becoming a pop star were weird and ended up being a preview for what Ashley would turn into. Then you have that episode where Will is caught by Lisa at a party and it becomes a serious Ashley episode for some reason, the witness protection episode (which, to be fair, was just a story Will was telling), the episode where Will makes out with Robin Givens and it's treated like it didn't happen. And of course, the season finale which undoes literally everything that we saw for half a season with no explanation as to why.
Fast forward to the season six premiere and Will inexplicably has nothing to do, just sitting around the house playing with toys and nobody wants anything to do with him. Then he burns the kitchen down and he has to figure out how to keep Uncle Phil from seeing it because he has an important dinner that same night.