Most shows need time to mature, some requiring a season or two to find their legs if the audience or platform will allow them that space to develop. Blending cast, writing, and rhythm is often an ungainly disjointedness masked by a charismatic star or the fact that the series serves an overlooked audience.
Case in point, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, a show beloved by a generation yet so synonymous with Will Smith’s rise to stardom and Alfonso Ribeiro’s Carlton Dance that revisiting its first season proves a tour through uneven storytelling terrain.
Many early episodes veer between Smith’s manic physical humor contrasted against the wealthy but uptight new family and a variety of socially conscious coming of age tropes built on his fish-out-of-water “kid from west Philadelphia, born and raised” who “became the prince of a town called Bel Air” without ever finding a comfortable balance between those two elements.
So, it’s more than a little surprising to find the singular episode of The Fresh Prince, “Mistaken Identity,” clocking in at Episode Six of Season One. I mean, this installment is but a mere handful of episodes removed from Smith silently mouthing the lines of his costars on camera while waiting for his own. And yet, the phrase “lightning in a bottle” exists for a reason.
Let’s be clear: “Mistaken Identity” is still raw compared to the later episodes most fans consider the show’s best. Case in point, the best scene of the series comes in Season Four’s “Papa’s Got a Brand-New Excuse.” Confronted with once again being let down by his absentee father (played with a phenomenally understated vulnerability by Ben Vereen), Smith improvised a monologue of broken self-sufficiency and shed real tears. And James Avery’s equally real response as Uncle Phil to gather Smith up in his arms was beautiful.
But it’s that very authenticity that causes those four minutes overshadow the other 18 in the episode, leaving the two parts out of step with each other.
Another incandescent moment comes in final scene of the series’ final episode, “I, Done” when the cast said goodbye to each other on camera, leaving Will standing alone in the empty Bel Air mansion he’d first come to six seasons earlier.
The moment is poignant if a little overwrought, undercut by a slap-stick final moment of Carlton running through the scene with his pants half down, afraid he’s being left behind as the family moves to New York. While powerful, this scene was more a well-deserved victory lap for the cast that ends up more cohesive with the series as a whole than its specific episode
What other episodes lack in cohesiveness, however, can be found in “Mistaken Identity,” which is the first to thread the needle between the show’s often brash humor and its honest engagement with serious social issues.
The plot was simple. Carlton volunteers to drive a Mercedes belonging a partner at his father’s law firm from L.A. to Palm Springs where he will meet his family for a weekend getaway. Will tags along without telling him and the two get lost, eventually getting pulled over and racially profiled by small town police officers (one played with a useful flatness of affect by Hank Azaria).
This section of the show establishes both the light-hearted humor that drives the odd-couple dynamic of Will and Carlton’s relationship (Will frightens him by jumping out of the back seat in Freddy Krueger mask). It also captures the tension created by the over-policing of black men, prompting Will to give a socially clueless Carlton “The Talk” about how to interact with the police as safely as possible when pulled over, a scene that manages to carry the weight of the moment while riding the humor in Smith’s over-the-top persona.
The two are held in the local jail after the officers claim they have confessed to stealing cars—a situation worsened by Carlton’s insistence on trusting the system—until Uncle Phil, Aunt Viv (played with brilliant motherly anger by Janet Huber) show up to get them released. They are also demeaned by the officers, despite their affluence and righteous indignation, until Phil’s white partner shows up and the demeanor in the room shifts completely.
The show ends in the Banks’ mansion where everyone is visibly shaken except Carlton, who clings to his illusions of fairness in the system until both Will and his father shake it loose. The final scene, then, is Carlton alone on the couch as the realization of the racial injustice he faces slowly spreads across his face.
This moment, then, becomes the bar for determining which episodes of The Fresh Prince stand up in their entirety. In “Mistaken Identity,” everyone is confronted simultaneously with their privilege and lack thereof in the face of systemic racial injustice, a confrontation threaded through the entire show that comes to a head in its final scene.
Carlton’s illusions of fairness are met with the messier reality that, because he is black, the system offers him no extra favor even if he adheres to it. Uncle Phil is crestfallen to realize the affluent life he built to shield his children from these racial realities can’t protect them. And Will’s feelings about inequality are reinforced in a fresh way when he witnesses the collapse of his cousin’s naive expectations.
Yet all of this is accomplished without losing the humor that will serve as the show’s chief tone-setting element for the rest of its run. In essence, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air finds itself in the elements of this episode, and that what makes it the show’s one perfect iteration.
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and narrative nonfiction whose work has appeared in publications such as Pleiades, The Other Journal, Angel City Review, and Relief among others. He is also the co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and Creative Writing Innovations, both from Bloomsbury Academic. He lives and works in the Los Angeles area.