A Different World, 31 Years Later, Still Has Something to Say

There was a viral clip going around in June, an outtake from A Different World. In it, the actress Jasmine Guy, as Whitley Gilbert, dances before a mirror, fawning over photographs of Denzel Washington. She swishes, she sways—not so much the practiced seduction of a Southern belle, but more so, in the movements Guy gives, a pure bodily response to the very idea of a man like Denzel, all that sex and promise and intelligence and force and fierceness.

In the viral clip, the show’s producer and director, Debbie Allen, had arranged to have Denzel stand beside Guy as she acted. The audience, in that goofy way of live studio audiences of another era, goes wild when he appears, but Guy, ever a professional, is focused on her performance. Then she turns, sees him, puts her hand to her chest, and falls back, astounded, bathed in cheers and laughter.

When writing about the allure of A Different World, this unstaged and unaired clip—more than any of the episodes I watched, cast photos I looked at, or listicles of outfits—captured why the show felt special. Or maybe this is just my chance to sing the praises of Guy, without whom the show would have fallen apart. Guy playing Whitley is a master class in Black female performance. When I watch her, I see an act on top of an act, a meta reference that transcends even the show’s sharp writing.

A Different World ran on network television from 1987 to 1993, a six-year period that saw the tastes of the television viewing public shift from deeply earnest shows like The Wonder Years (1988-1993) and The Cosby Show (1984-1992)—A Different World’s parent show—to the unfocused snark of sitcoms like Seinfeld (1989-1998), which entered the Nielsen ratings’ top 10 after A Different World’s final season. The Cosby Show and early episodes of A Different World existed in a network television landscape where one was still what one said one was. By 1993, even network television allowed giant quotation marks around everything.

The irony, of course, is that we now know that Bill Cosby was precisely not the benevolent and kind patriarch he claimed to be on and off The Cosby Show. Or perhaps, more accurately, he was that figure and also a sexual predator. That awful jumble of roles was explored in art made by Black women in the ’80s, when The Cosby Show was at its height.

Rivaling The Cosby Show in popularity, some of the biggest Black film and television productions of the ’80s were The Color Purple (1985) and The Women of Brewster Place (1989)—the struggle cinema of Black womanhood that depicted men like Cosby. When The Color Purple was released, groups of Black men organized to protest the depiction of Black male characters in the film, and it was denounced by many for its depiction of abuse in a Black family. The argument centered on the assertion that the abusive figures in the film were caricatures and were not how anyone would actually act. Meanwhile, Cosby, as we now know, an abuser of almost cartoonish influence, acted everywhere.

A Different World embodies this intellectual shift from earnestness to irony and hints at this philosophical disruption from its first episode. The opening shot is Kadeem Hardison’s Dwayne Wayne looking directly into the camera, monologuing. To use an incredibly outdated phrase, he’s pitching the woo. It’s an odd choice for a sitcom that was supposed to be about Denise, the wayward daughter of Claire and Cliff Huxtable, finding herself at college. The very first perspective isn’t hers—it’s Dwayne’s appreciative gaze. It’s also a completely unconventional shot for the opening of a sitcom—one that calls to mind the direct-to-camera addresses Spike Lee made famous in his first feature, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), which came out a year before A Different World premiered. She’s Gotta Have It is another exploration of young Black women’s interiority through the desire and gaze of men—a glimpse of personal self-determination that falls apart in the movie’s infamous denouement of sexual violence. Up until that point, the female protagonist has been attempting to understand her own life of romantic and artistic freedom.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, The Cosby Show was coming off a half decade of booming success. The sitcom was a revelation of Black middle-class values and storylines in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s America and the establishment’s final erasure of Black radicalism from mainstream discourse. Amidst all those wins, Cosby, the nightclub comic, sitcom star, and television actor aspired to be something more—a leader of Black uplift, that project that has obsessed the tiny but influential Black professional class since the end of enslavement. That uplift is wrapped up in the idea that there is something pathologically wrong with the Black working class and that Black middle-class ease and relative assimilation into the white American body politic should be the political goal of Black people—not a repudiation of the rottenness, from its roots, of the American project as a whole.

In the prison of Black uplift, there isn’t much room to be fallible, that is, to be human. Cosby created A Different World as a starring vehicle for Lisa Bonet, the impossibly cool and chic actress who played his second-oldest daughter, Denise. Bonet, with her bohemian fashion sense and ability to play dreamy and comedic at the same time, was a presence that hadn’t been seen before in American media, certainly not in the workshopped-to-death milieu of network sitcoms. Bonet’s line readings always come off as nonchalant, as natural, even when the jokes she says are met with a studio audience’s laughter. She is that thing that is so rare in performers—authentic. Cosby, a titan of show business, had to have understood her star power, and as Bonet chafed against the creative limitations of The Cosby Show, he made her this spin-off, A Different World. This move would accomplish two things at once. First, it placed Bonet firmly back into the role of an American sweetheart, bohemian in dress maybe, but still wholesome and grappling with the kinds of dilemmas a nice, middle-class kid might encounter. The second thing A Different World did was provide space for Cosby to platform the idea of educational uplift for Black advancement through the depiction of Hillman College. But the things that made Bonet a star would lead to her banishment from the show. In between the first and second season, Bonet starred in Angel Heart (1987), an erotic thriller in which she appeared topless at 19. A year later, she was pregnant. She left A Different World in a shower of Cosby’s public disapproval. His sexual disgraces, cases of assault, were not widely known when he was morally shaming Bonet. The show went on without her.

Enter Whitley. Enter the great comedic actress Jasmine Guy. We see Whitley as she’s heading down the stairs and spots Denise. “We have so much to catch up on,” Whitley says to her. It’s the shorthand of the insular—a way to gauge that you belong to the right world. Denise answers in exasperation—you already know she’s too cool for Whitley, who disparages Denise’s roommate, Dawnn Jewell Lewis’s Jaleesa, for being the unheard-of age of 26 and also divorced.

But in Guy’s and the writers’ hands, after the exit of Denise, Whitley becomes a revelation, an inside-out version of hincty. She frets over Dwayne and tussles with her mother—played by Diahann Carroll, the haughty Dominque Deveraux on Dynasty, in a brilliant piece of casting—and is one of the great spoiled rich bitch turns from caricature to character. Guy is a trained dancer, and she imbues every flounce, shoulder roll, and imperious stare of Whitley’s with the air of the slightly manic, slightly ridiculous. When I watch Whitley, I see a girl practicing how to be a woman who commands respect. Do you do so with the false bravado of your mother, obsessed with appearances and pecking orders and respectability? Or do you do so from a place of integrity, of authenticity?

I think Guy’s performance of Whitley is why the show is so fondly remembered. So many of the episodes fall into the trap of lessons of the week—understandable, perhaps, for a sitcom about college students, aimed at a youth audience. But amidst the morality plays about the dangers of AIDS and discrimination at department stores, Guy’s performance captures the flirtation and the weight of girlhood. Her performance alludes to the much-referenced four Black female stereotypes of fiction and film, immortalized in Nina Simone’s 1966 song “Four Women,” the Mammy, the Jezebel, the Tragic Mulatto, and the Angry Black Woman. Whitley, as Guy plays her, flirts with the edges of each but always turns to the comedic to become something else, something whole in the confines of a studio creation.

When I watch her, I am reminded of what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as the fugitive scholar: “The subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.”

There’s a scene in the second season of the show wherein Jaleesa and Whitley stand in the dorm’s communal bathroom, again facing the camera, ostensibly readying themselves in a mirror. Guy, as Whitley, has set her jaw into a hard punch as she dabs cold cream on her face. She mews a bit of a song that Jaleesa matches with a growl. Guy cuts her eyes to the side—the theatrical signature of a sitcom villain. She sings again, lifting her soprano to battle Lewis’s alto. Their voices spar for a minute and then the scene turns—what comes between them is a tease and finally a dance, a duet of appreciation. In another, lesser show, these two would be turned against each other. But what makes A Different World endure is that it makes space for another way for these differing voices to meet.