Will Smith is entitled to his opinion, but he’s wrong when it comes to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air jumping the shark. For the past 25 years, Smith has been one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world, and one of the most bankable. His career has hit a few rough patches, but those never seem to really effect his personal popularity, explaining why studios keep casting Smith to lead big budget movies in the hopes that he’ll work some box office magic.
Of course, there would be no Smith movie career as fans know it today without his years playing the titular role on NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Partially based on Smith’s real-life, Fresh Prince was one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, and is one of those classic comedies that’s never really gone away. It’s consistently aired in reruns on cable since it ended, and can now be found streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.
As with most sitcoms though, even the best of the best, there was a drop-off in quality as the years went on. That’s not to say that Fresh Prince ever got abysmal or unbearable to watch, but its later seasons certainly aren’t its best, and Fresh Prince ending with season 6 made sense. In Smith’s 2021 memoir, entitled simply Will, he asserts that Fresh Prince declined with the season 5 episode “Bullets Over Bel-Air”, which sees Will get shot and an upset Carlton get a gun for protection. While season 5 could definitely be pointed to as being when Fresh Prince hit a clear downturn in quality, Smith is off base by pegging “Bullets Over Bel-Air” as the moment the show “jumped the shark.”
“Bullets Over Bel-Air” may be much more dramatic than normal, and is certainly a departure from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s usual tone, but contrary to Smith’s assessment, most fans seem to regard the episode as being one of the best. Whereas the phrase “jumping the shark” traces back to a storyline involving Henry Winkler’s The Fonz on Happy Days that employed unlikely and over-the-top events for the sake of novelty, “Bullets Over Bel-Air” tackled the issue of gun violence, which was far from a rare problem at the time. It does so in a refreshingly grounded way too, with Smith and co-star Alfonso Riberio turning in nuanced, emotional performances.
That said, Smith probably isn’t far off as to when Fresh Prince of Bel-Air did indeed “jump the shark”. Season 5 had already played host to lots of overly silly, or outright bad episodes, such as “Fresh Prince the Movie,” in which Will spins a tall tale to his friend Jazz about how he witnessed a murder and the Banks family was forced to hide out in Alabama under the Witness Protection Program. That’s definitely a candidate for shark-jumping. There’s also season 5’s opening, which undoes Will’s decision to stay with his mom in Philadelphia by literally having NBC executives force his return to Bel-Air, which reeks of not knowing how to write Will out of the situation they had placed him in.
Another regrettable part of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air‘s penultimate season was the long storyline involving Will and Lisa’s romance, which teased a wedding several times, but ultimately went nowhere and felt pointless, with Lisa just fading away in the end. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air would have a few more genuinely good episodes after “Bullets Over Bel-Air,” including the series finale that features a terrific moment in which Uncle Phil declares Will his son, but those were few. Thus, it’s arguable that “Bullets Over Bel-Air” wasn’t the beginning of Fresh Prince‘s downturn, but instead its last gasp of true greatness after said downturn had already begun.
About The Author
