Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Fresh Prince Of Bel Air: Cast Photo

The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air aired from September 1990 until September 1996 on NBC.

A Black rapper from a tough neighborhood found himself deposited in a cartoonish sitcom in this rather funky comedy, co-produced by musician Quincy Jones. Will ( Will Smith), was the kid from West Philadelphia who was sent west to live with wealthy relatives in Bel Air, California, when things got a little to dangerous in the 'hood.' To groovin Will, Uncle Phillip and his stuck-up clan at first seemed like a travesty on upwardly mobile blacks. They lived in a preposterously ornate mansion, spoke in oh-so-refined language and even had a liveried butler, Geoffrey. But the pompous Phillip ( James Avery), an attorney, could tell Will a thing or two about the black experience when the occasion demanded; and Geoffrey ( Joseph Marcell), despite his imperious manner, was a surprising ally. Carlton ( Alfonso Ribeiro), was the preppy son, Hillary ( Karyn Parsons), the spoiled-brat teenage daughter, and Ashley ( Tatyana M. Ali), the youngest-with whom Will hit it off imediately. Sensible Aunt Vivian ( Janet Hubert-Whitten, and later Daphne Maxwell Reid), mediated as required.

Amid the comedy of clashing cultures, viewers were regularly offered morals, sometimes rather explicit about the difficulties faced by blacks in a white socirty. Will's friend Jazz (D.J. Jazzy Jeff),among others , periodically brought a little soul to The Banks Mansion as well as to exclusive Bel Air Academy, where Will would never quite fit in.

Will Smith, who played the title role with iinfectious enthusiasm, was a real life rap star. He and his partner Jeff Townes ( DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince) won a Grammy award for their 1988 hit " Parents Just Don't understand." Mercifully the rap content in the series was confined to the credits, but a good deal of black music still found it's way into episodes. Especially when Will wanted to loosen up those bros.

The 1993-1994 season brought a number of changes. Will and Carlton graduated from prep school and enrolled together at The University Of Los Angeles while sharing the pool house as their bachelor pad. At the same time Jackie ( Tyra Banks), Will's ex-girlfriend from Philadelphia, showed up to complicate his life. At home , Aunt Vivian gave birth to her 4th child, Nicky, who joined the cast full time the following season ( already 5 years old and now played by Ross Bagley). Also in 1994-1995 Ashley became a singer and Will found a new girlfriend, Lisa ( Nia Long), after a whirlwind courtship they were nearly married in 1995.

In the series final Uncle Phillip put the mansion up for sale and after showing it to several prospective buyers, including Mr. Drummond and Arnold of Diff'rent Strokes ( Conrad Bain and Gary Coleman), sold it to George and Louise Jefferson of The Jeffersons( Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford; Marla Gibbs also showed up as Florence). Everyone moved on to bigger things except Will who seemed to be " stuck on the soft shoulder of life."

A Review from USA TODAY

TV PREVIEW/ BY MATT ROUSH

The Fresh prince charms 'Bel-Air'

The prince is fresh. Long live the prince. And while not exactly stale, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is an awfully creaky albeit cute, showcase for what NBC is touting as its brightest hope since The Golden Girls.

Like a Diff'rent Strokes with a hipper star and caretakers who are of the same race, Fresh Prince renders safe the street lingo of rap. Musician Will Smith, the title character, is a " dis" out of water. He's so lovable few are likely to resist bopping along.

In the infectious opening titles, Smith raps his way from the graffitied streets of West Philadelphia to the West Coast luxury of Beverly Hills. A late-adolescent Annie whose spunk is draped with funk, Smith is all gangly, grinning cheer.

Though Malcolm X is his purported idol, Smith's real mentor is the Cos. Gentle derision , not socially aware ire, characterizes his take on the absurdities of his new family: stuffed-shirt uncle ( who also knows his Malcolm), prepped-out cousins who idolize Bryant Gumbel and Ally Sheedy.

He is closest to his smallest cousin ( Tatyana M. Ali), a sweetheart who stops the show by rapping grace at a dinner party.

Whether clinking crystal to a beat or jiving with the crusty butler, Smith is looked upon by even his detractors with condescending " isn't he something" adoration. Tiresome as that is, Smith's breezy and non-combative charm gives this the look of a winner.

Even if, in concept, it's more nap time than rap time.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly
Published on September 7, 1990

Pop Culture News
MR. SMITH GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
NBC IS BETTING THAT POPULAR RAPPER FRESH PRINCE WILL BE THE SEASON'S BIGGEST STAR. WHERE THERE'S A WILL, THERE'S A WAY.
By Mark Harris

One steamy night in July, Will Smith, a 21-year-old rapper out of West Philadelphia, put on a sweatsuit and drove to Los Angeles' Century Plaza Hotel for a command performance: an NBC press party at which the network's stars were expected to smile, shake hands all around, and drum up publicity for their new series and movies. But when Smith arrived, he quickly and politely moved past the cordon of celebrities, and found a spot in a secluded corner behind a high hedge, where he sat for most of the evening, sleepily eyeing a pickup basketball game near the pool and eating dinner. NBC didn't mind allowing its star-in-the-making one more night in the shadows. If the network has its way, Will Smith is going to land in the limelight and make NBC hundreds of millions of dollars. Smith is the owner of several platinum records, a deferred scholarship to MIT, and a gold-and-diamond herringbone chain that announces his public identity: the Fresh Prince. Under this alias, Smith fronts one of the world's most popular rap duos, and he's also the main attraction on the new hip-hop- meets-mainstream comedy The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (Mondays at 8 p.m., starting Sept. 10), which NBC hopes will achieve Cosby-level success. With its potential to draw in young, old, black, and white viewers, Fresh Prince is considered vital to NBC's prime-time lineup. The network has accordingly made Smith's days long and public, and, except for the supper behind the hedge, he has raced relentlessly through NBC's paces. At one point in the preseason festivities, he was called to a microphone to pay tribute in song to network chairman Brandon Tartikoff, and if Smith felt awkward, he didn't show it. ''Carol Burnett, she was right in swing/And you hit it on the head with that show called Wings,'' he chanted gamely to the man he called ''M.C. B.T.'' ''B.T.'' was clearly pleased. Tartikoff has made no secret of his belief that Smith represents the network's best hope for an instant hit since The Golden Girls made its debut in 1985. In NBC's publicity barrage, Smith has been compared to Michael J. Fox, Eddie Murphy, and Oprah Winfrey, and the network has rushed the young musician through an unusually intense whirlwind of photo shoots, interviews, press sessions, promotions, and rehearsals. As he starts work on the series and a new rap album, Smith is taking it all calmly. ''I'll work on the show from nine to five and go into the studio from six to midnight for as long as I can do it,'' he says. If Smith accepts the pace, he seems slightly nervous about the hype. ''People are expecting a lot, and I've never done any acting, so I don't want to be compared to anyone,'' he says in a soft voice. ''I have a natural feel, but let me practice first so I can be proud of what I do. This is really new for me. I had to learn not to look at the camera. In videos, that's what you do.'' Doing that, in fact, was how he came to TV. It was Smith's in-your-face, eyeballs-to-the-lens performances in the comical videos for ''Parents Just Don't Understand'' and ''I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson'' that first attracted TV producers. Smith and his partner, 24-year-old Jeff Townes (who, as D.J. Jazzy Jeff, provides music for Smith's lyrics), have worked together since Smith was a student at Philadelphia's Overbrook High. Their clowning, flavored with suburban teenage complaints and pop-culture pokes at everything from The Brady Bunch to Freddy Krueger, first yielded a hit in 1986, when ''Girls Ain't Nothin' but Trouble'' became a European sensation. They weren't exactly ready. ''We landed in England and thought, 'Damn, what is this? What are they screaming for?''' Smith and Townes expanded that success with the albums He's the D.J., I'm the Rapper (1987) and And in This Corner (1989). In music videos, their cartoonish songs became mini-movies displaying Smith's instinctive comic grace. But, though Smith was eager to try acting, he fled when producers first came knocking. He didn't show up for an audition for The Cosby Show last year. An offer from A Different World followed and on the day of his tryout, Smith was again absent. ''I realized later,'' he says, ''how scared I was to take that step.'' Smith eventually decided he was ''ready to take a shot.'' At The Arsenio Hall Show, he met Benny Medina, head of black music at Warner Bros. Records, who approached him with an idea for a show loosely based on Medina's life. It would be about a black teenager, steeped in East Coast hip-hop culture, who moves in with relatives in Beverly Hills. Smith signed up within days, and music impresario Quincy Jones, whose credits range from his own recent album, Back on the Block, to Michael Jackson's Thriller, agreed to be co-executive producer. Weeks later, Jones assembled NBC executives to assess the acting skills of his new star, whose experience consisted of a brief role in a children's special. Between concert performances, Smith flew to L.A, went to Jones' Bel- Air home, disappeared into a bedroom to rehearse, came out and performed two scenes from an unused script written for musician Morris Day of the Time. NBC approved the series almost instantly.

A few days after NBC's press party, Smith, publicist in tow, shows up for a breakfast, looking more relaxed and energetic. Shooting on the second episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air will start in less than a week, and Smith has been reviewing his work in the pilot with a critical eye. "There were things I could have done better," he says, and he's especially down on his delivery of a one-liner to the pompous family butler. "I missed the rhythm. I didn't quite hit the laugh." Smith is just one of many cooks involved in The Fresh Prince, and they all have strong ideas about how the show should work. Tartikoff's interest in the pilot was so personal that he tiptoed down to the soundstage to offer sotto voce advice during shooting. And to shape the show's plots, Jones and Medina have hired writer-producers Andy and Susan Borowitz, white, married Harvard graduates whose credits include Family Ties and Day by Day and who joke that "most of the show's going to be drawn from our vast black experience." Not least, there's Smith himself, who has strong ideas about his role and wants room to invent his character. "We're trying to take the rap perspective, which is unique and surreal, and build a sitcom around it rather than make him just the 19th jive-ass teen on TV," Andy Borowitz says. Part of that process involves letting Smith improvise, within limits. "He can do as much as he wants for the first three days," Borowitz says. "Some of his ideas are great, and by Wednesday night we put a lot of them in the script. But then, he's got to stick to it. It's not like Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy, when the writers never knew what would come out of his mouth during taping." Adds Susan Borowitz, "Will gives the impression of spontaneity, but you're really seeing an extremely disciplined guy who is very committed to acting. And he's getting better every week." "You should see him waiting to go on," Andy says. "He looks like a kid waiting to be bar mitzvahed. He's that serious." Smith's rapper-next-door image-the handsome, bright kid who sings about nothing more threatening than taking the family car without asking Dad-makes him the perfect vessel to carry rap to middle America. His childhood was suburban rather than "street," and in school, he combined good grades with enough attitude to earn his nickname. (Dubbed "Prince" by a teacher "who thought I was a royal a---," he tacked on "Fresh" himself.) Even his family squabbles would make a parent proud: One of his toughest moments came when he told his mother he was turning down an engineering program at MIT to pursue music. But while he acknowledges his squeaky-clean image, he doesn't want the series to turn its characters into new, idealized cliches. "The show's about difference more than conflict," he says. "I don't know how much freedom I'll have, but there are a lot of issues I'll want to touch on. For instance, I'm sure my character likes the 2 Live Crew, so maybe there'll be an episode where his uncle doesn't want it in the house. "I think on this show a large portion of black America is being represented, which is very important to me. You know, if you're 5 or 6 years old and all you watch is Sanford and Son or Good Times, that's all that's real to you. Then, something like Cosby comes on and some people think, that's impossible-no way would a black doctor marry a black lawyer. I'm happy to have the opportunity to turn a little more of that around." Before that happens, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has to become a hit, but all predictions are that it will. With the help of a couple of gimmicks-among them an early guest appearance by D.J. Jazzy Jeff-NBC hopes to attract 30 percent of the viewing audience, which would land the show in the top 10; ad agencies are predicting a solid share of about 23 percent. Even that should be enough to beat the time-slot competition, CBS' Uncle Buck, ABC's MacGyver, and Fox's Monday-night movie. In any case, Smith knows he has hard work ahead. "I'll eat right and take my vitamins," he says. "I don't party, and I only have one girlfriend (Tanya Moore, a wardrobe assistant who will buy his clothes)." He's also getting ready for fame. As he finishes breakfast, a middle-aged woman approaches, transfixed by his medallion. "Oh my God," she murmurs. "You're the Fresh Prince. The Fresh Prince. It's so great that you're the Fresh Prince." "Thank you," says Smith, smiling, not sure how to respond. "You're going to have to get used to a lot more of that," cautions his publicist. "Yeah, really," says Smith, looking pleased but flustered. "At least, that's what I hear."

An Article from The New York Times

'Fresh Prince of Bel Air' Puts Rap in Mainstream

By LARRY ROHTER, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 17, 1990

It took less than a decade for rap music to push its way off the streets of the South Bronx and become a dominant force in the Top 40. Now, in a programming gamble being watched in network and advertising offices, NBC is about to find out whether the rap, or hip-hop, style can dent the Nielsen ratings.

''Fresh Prince of Bel Air,'' a half-hour situation comedy with the rapper Will Smith in the title role, went on the air on Monday as the most highly touted show of the fall television season. It is an unusual status to be conferred on a new program that is based on an untried premise, leans on associations with a musical genre unknown to many viewers and stars a 21-year-old who never acted before.

The series got off to a solid start with its premiere episode, scoring a 13.6 rating that outpaced CBS's ''Uncle Buck,'' also a new program. But how well ''Fresh Prince'' will really fare will become clear only after full competition resumes today when ABC's ''MacGyver'' returns for the fall. Fox's ''Night at the Movies'' makes its debut later.

Mr. Smith, half of the rap music duo D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, plays a teen-ager from the Philadelphia ghetto who is sent to live with his square and snooty cousins in their Bel Air mansion. There are echoes here, of course, of such hits as''Diff'rent Strokes'' and even ''The Beverly Hillbillies,'' but Mr. Smith and others involved say they are trying to inject some realism and ''another view of the black experience'' to the sitcom formula.

'The Purest Street Awareness'

''The basis of this show is fish out of water,'' said the executive producer, Quincy Jones, the music impresario who has never before put his name on a television series but whose work as producer of Michael Jackson's albums won him respect in Hollywood as a canny judge of public tastes. ''Rap is not the primary focus. If you took the rap out, the premise wouldn't fall apart. But rap gives you the purest street awareness.''

Just how much of rap culture should be grafted onto the comedic is a problem the producers, writers and actors of ''Fresh Prince'' are still trying to solve. Their efforts ever since the head of NBC Entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff, approved the project in April have been aimed at finding a tone that preserves the grittiness of hip-hop without alienating a mass audience expecting laughs.

''When we handed in the first draft of the script, the network freaked out,'' said Susan Borowitz, a veteran of ''Family Ties'' who wrote the pilot episode with her husband, Andy, and produces the show with him. ''They were expecting 'Crocodile Dundee' and 'Beverly Hills Cop' and were quite taken aback by the Malcolm X poster'' that Mr. Smith's character hangs in his bedroom.

The primary focus of the series is not tension between blacks and whites, but the cultural differences and misunderstandings that separate Fresh Prince and the black bourgeoisie, represented by his relatives. Imagine the domestic bliss of the Huxtable family on ''The Cosby Show'' interrupted by a good-natured but coarse and noisy intruder from the streets, and you have ''Fresh Prince'' in a nutshell.

Characters Over Concept

''The concept of this show has been described as slender and slight, and that's true,'' said Mr. Borowitz, who worked at the ''Harvard Lampoon'' with his wife before going on to write for ''Archie Bunker's Place.''. ''This a vehicle to bring the hip-hop sensibility and Will Smith to television. The characters and the actors are more important'' than the concept.

No sooner had NBC added ''Fresh Prince'' to its fall schedule than the rap group 2 Live Crew found itself embroiled in an ugly obscenity controversy that sullied the public image of the entire genre. But the phenomenal success this summer of M. C. Hammer's album ''Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em,'' which has been the most popular recording in the country for 14 consecutive weeks and has sold more than four million copies, suggests that rap music has also found a mass acceptability that augurs well for the series.

''Will is not threatening,'' said a co-producer Benny Medina, who developed the original idea for the series out of his own experience as a black teen-ager from a poor neighborhood who moved in with a Jewish family in Beverly Hills. ''As the show develops, we will start to deal with some of the same things as N.W.A., Public Enemy, Ice Cube and artists with a much more radical way of communicating their life style. But we'll do it Will's way, rather than in their language.''

One initial doubt about the program has already been resolved, however: Mr. Smith not only can sing, write and dance, he clearly can act too. Taping an episode that pairs him with the veteran leading man Richard Roundtree in front of a live audience, Mr. Smith displayed a strong sense of comedic timing, mugged for the camera at will, improvised dialogue with alacrity and, on the few occasions he muffed a line, calmly called out ''Sorry, Mom,'' to his mother, visiting from Philadelphia and watching the performance from the audience.

''It's pretty easy, and not just because I'm basically playing myself,'' Mr. Smith said of his switch from the concert stage to the soundstage. ''With rapping, it's a lot of lines you have to learn anyway. And with a rap performance, I can't just call out for the script if I can't remember a line. If I forget a line, I'm lost. So this is a lot easier.''

Mr. Smith, who is also recording his fourth album, said he expected the series to do well because ''people want to be thrown a bit.'' He professes to be unconcerned should he, Mr. Tartikoff, Mr. Jones and all the others be proven wrong.

''That's not pressure for me,'' Mr. Smith said. ''That's pressure for them. If the show doesn't go well for me, I won't be any worse off. The pressure is on NBC.''

An Article from Jet Magazine

Whitten riled by recent firing from NBC-TVs 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.' - Janet Hubert-Whitten
Jet, August 9, 1993

Janet Hubert-Whitten, recently fired from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," told Jet that she is a scapegoat and the victim of a vendetta waged by NBC and the show's officials.

Ms. Hubert-Whitten said the network tried to reduce the number of episodes she'd appear in from 25 to 13 and cut her salary in half.

"They (NBC officials) kept calling me asking me to say the parting was mutual, but I'm not like that," she said. "I fight back. They intended to slap me on the wrist if I would behave like a good little ****** woman."

She admitted that she was moody on the set last season because of a difficult pregnancy. "I was extremely moody and gained 65 pounds. I was moody to the point of not talking to people. Every pregnant woman is moody. But, I was loyal and worked up to the day I delivered my son."

There was a lot of tension on the set of "Fresh Prince" last year "between factions but I was not in it. As a cast, we fought like all families do but we made up and got along." She did not elaborate on the factions. Jet was told that she had contacted Will Smith, star of the hit sitcom but was told he had nothing to do with her dismissal.

She said she has been made the scapegoat for a variety of problems that she had nothing to do with. She was not certain whether or not the network was upset at her for being pregnant in the first place.

NBFC issued a statement that read: "We were unable to reach agreement in renegotiating Janet Hubert-Whitten's contract for the next season with "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." She will not be returning to the show." There were no further comments on charges she made.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly
Published on December 24, 1993

CAN WILL SMITH PLAY ON PARK AVENUE?
IN 'SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION,' THE SITCOM STAR TESTS HIS SKILLS WITH THE ACTING ELITE

Will Smith is trying to solve a difficult problem. Between takes in the filming of Six Degrees of Separation, he huddles in one corner of a dingy New York City apartment with Australian director Fred Schepisi (A Cry in the Dark), bowing his head in deep concentration.

While crew members quietly dismantle the lights and cameras and set up for the next shot, Schepisi and Smith continue what has become a daily preoccupation. Suddenly, Smith's baritone breaks the silence. ''Bam!'' he booms, pumping his fist in the air and jumping back to reveal a small electronic chessboard that has been the focus of their attention. ''I blocked your check, baby!'' Surprising those who think they have him pegged is nothing new for Will Smith, who, at 25, has built a thriving career largely by being a quick learner. By 1989, at the age of 20, Smith had already made and, thanks to excessive spending, lost his first million, which he had earned as half of rap's good-guy group D.J. Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. The next year, he emerged as NBC's golden boy with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the hit sitcom that executive producer Quincy Jones had developed just for him. And last summer, he brought his boyish wit and hyperkinetic energy to the big screen as the wisecracking best buddy of Whoopi Goldberg's daughter in the Goldberg-Ted Danson comedy Made in America. But now Smith is taking on a serious role and a different persona in Six Degrees, based on John Guare's acclaimed, inspired-by-fact 1990 play. He plays Paul, a hustler who cons his way into the Manhattan apartment of a wealthy couple (Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing) by convincing them he's the son of Sidney Poitier and a schoolmate of their children's. Knowledgeable about art and literature, Paul wangles an invitation to stay the night. But when they find him the next morning in bed with a man he picked up in Central Park, the layers of his carefully constructed identity begin to fall away. ; Paul's seductive powers and remarkable ability to transform himself-from street kid to passable preppy-seem to mirror the same traits in Smith. In an industry that is quick to typecast, Smith has consistently succeeded in reinventing himself, crossing media with apparent ease. But his easygoing, arrested-adolescent exterior conceals a relentlessly driven husband and father (he married Sheree Zampino in 1991; their son, Willard Smith III, is 13 months old) who can be both intensely circumspect and disarmingly naive. Says Channing, ''That kind of gravity, which is surprising in Will, is very good in the character.'' Casting the very popular and very mainstream star of Fresh Prince made financial sense for a film that might otherwise have rated as art-house fare. But that didn't allay fears that Smith would be way out of his depth amid a New York-based, largely theater-trained cast.

''Everybody got excited about Will, but I was a little more cautious,'' admits Schepisi. ''I interviewed a lot of actors. But Will tried to convince me that he'd do whatever it would take, would go through whatever process, was sure he could get himself prepared. That confidence and charm was everything the character should be. (He was) worth taking a chance on.'' At Schepisi's request, Smith trained with both an acting and a dialect coach at least three days a week for three months before rehearsals began. ''This character had to learn to walk and talk and act,'' says Smith. ''And I had to learn to walk and talk and act to play him.'' By the time shooting started, Smith had sharpened his acting skills-but he hadn't toned down his boisterous side. ''Will is used to driving the set on Fresh Prince and keeping up enthusiasm,'' says Schepisi. ''On the first day, just before a take, he let out some wild yells and clapped his hands. He was deafening the sound people and everyone else around him. Finally, Donald took him aside.'' ''I have this childish energy that manifests itself in noise,'' says Smith, tapping his fingers on a small Formica table in his trailer, parked outside a run-down tenement where Six Degrees is filming. ''Donald grabbed my hand and kissed me on the cheek and said, 'Shut up.' That was cool. I'm totally fine with someone who says, 'I think it's time to work now.' '' ''Will was wonderful,'' says Sutherland, who, like Channing and playwright Guare, had never heard of Smith before working with him. ''He's just younger. I wanted to sleep on the set. I'm an old guy.'' Despite Smith's commitment to the role, he has recently had to answer for balking at one pivotal scene: a fleeting on-screen kiss with Anthony Michael Hall, who plays the prep-school kid infatuated with Paul. Just before the scene was to be shot, Smith told Schepisi he wouldn't go through with it. The director was forced to use a stand-in and show only the backs of the actors' heads. ''It was very immature on my part,'' Smith says now. ''I was thinking, 'How are my friends in Philly going to think about this?' I wasn't emotionally stable enough to artistically commit to that aspect of the film. In a movie with actors and a director and writer of this caliber, for me to be the one bringing something cheesy to it '' Smith trails off, clearly angry at himself for failing to finish the job. ''This was a valuable lesson for me,'' he says a moment later. ''Either you do it or you don't.'' In recent years, Smith has had to learn lessons a lot tougher than that one. In 1989, after spending all his money gambling in casinos, traveling with a huge entourage, and buying everything that caught his eye, he found himself broke. ''Everything my parents taught me was out the window as soon as that cash hit the bank account,'' he says. ''There's nothing more sobering than having six cars and a mansion one day and you can't even buy gas for the cars the next. It's really just last year that I finally paid off the IRS.'' Smith hopes to capitalize on Six Degrees by using his Fresh Prince hiatuses to make films and records. Though he says his music is still the most important aspect of his career, his latest album, Code Red, is on the low end of the pop charts. Given that fall from favor with the rap-buying crowd, his diversification into the world of serious acting is well-timed. But Smith, who maintains ''the music is going very well for me now, too,'' is approaching the next phase of his career with the same characteristic mixture of caution and abandon he brings to chess, a pastime he's been passionate about since he was 12. According to Schepisi, ''Sometimes (Will) would make a move and then say, 'I have to consider that one. I may take it back.' '' ''I don't plan that far ahead,'' says Smith of his career. ''I just want to be totally prepared when opportunity comes.'' *

For a look at the crossover between The Fresh Prince and In the House go to http://poobala.com/freshandinthehouse.html

For some more reviews of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air go to http://www.helium.com/knowledge/48533-reviews-fresh-prince