Writers Are the Foundation of a Show: Interview with ‘The Fresh Prince Project: How the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Remixed America’ Author Chris Palmer

More than thirty years have passed since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air premiered on NBC but unlike other family sitcoms of its era, it has remained culturally relevant and beloved by new generations of fans.

With fresh eyes on the show in the wake of 2022’s launch of Bel-Air, a Fresh Prince reboot on NBC’s Peacock, The Fresh Prince Project brings us never-before-told stories based on exclusive interviews with the show’s cast, creators, writers, and crew. The Fresh Prince Project is an eye-opening exploration and celebration of a show that not only made Will Smith a household name but helped redefine America’s understandings of race, sex, parenthood, and class.

Chris Palmer has spent twenty years as a journalist writing about the intersection of entertainment, culture, and sports for ESPN, GQ, and other outlets. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Lamar Odom’s memoir, Darkness to Light, and The Fresh Prince Project. 

Chris recently spoke with Script about his newly released book The Fresh Prince Project, which is 100% about the intersection of entertainment, culture, sports, and music and its profound effect on America. You'll find yourself flipping through all 320 pages deliberately taking notes about the entertainment business, how to conduct yourself in a writers' room, and a new sense of how this seemingly little comedy show was such a big catalyst for the writers in the room to the stars on screen. Chris shares what his North Star was, his research and interview touchstones, his writing journey, how this book can be a great resource for budding TV writers, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: Was there a North star that you were following when putting this book together?

Chris Palmer: In terms of a thematic structure, what I did was I took about six or seven of the most important episodes, and focused and kind of elaborated on those, and how they're still relevant today. So basically, there was an episode in the first season, which was written by Andy Borowitz, where Carlton and Will get pulled over in the car - driving while Black is still relevant today! So, I wanted to do the connection there. And then the fatherhood episode - fatherhood will always be an issue for a lot of people - the fraternity episode where Carlton has to prove his Blackness to other Black people and things of that nature. I was really interested in all of those topics. And so, I kind of built the book around that, but I wanted it to be funny too, because it's a funny show, with funny characters and a lot of silliness going on. I tried to weave in all of that, and find the right blend.

Sadie: And it definitely works. And it makes you think about other shows you mention in the book that was so formative and reflective and representative, shows from the 70s from Norman Lear to Bernie Mac, and Everybody Hates Chris to black-ish. These stories and characters are incredibly important - TV is a powerful tool. How much did Fresh Prince shape you when watching it and then leading into what your career is now?

Chris: Yeah, when the Fresh Prince first came on, I was pretty young back then, but I was excited for the show because I was a DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince fan. At the time, that was the only rap that my parents let me listen to - they liked them too. [laughs] So, I was excited when the show came out, and it was the first kind of Hip Hop'ish style show.

What I love about the show, and I spent a lot of time talking about is the sort of parallel lives that intertwine and in Will and Carlton, because there's so different and you find they're the same. Black folks are not this monolithic bunch, they're very different. And that's what the show did. It really showed that there are different slices to the experience. Here's Will, this cool Hip Hop guy, and everything he knows, he learned from his friends, because he didn't have a father figure. But Carlton, everything he knows he learned directly from his father. There's sort of opposing forces that kind of puncture each other's own realities. And then they realize that they have way more in common.

And to your question, I looked at the show back then and I was like, ‘I want to be Will.’ He's cool, he gets all the girls, and he played basketball and all this kind of stuff - but I wasn't that cool. And I looked at Carlton, and he was really into books and studying and learning. And I was too, but I wasn't that nerdy. So, I kind of saw each one of these characters, and I was always somewhere in the middle, but they each appeal to me equally.

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Sadie: In terms of the research that went into this book, what was that process like in pinpointing who you need to speak with and how their voice would shape the book?

Chris: When the book was greenlit, and I was ready to go, the first step is the research. And you start the research before anything else, because there's so much you have to know, that I didn't know before you can even begin to interview people. And so, it's the research process, the interviewing, and then the writing, but the research process starts at the beginning. And it never ends - it ends when the book ends - because you're always finding things out, studying a new character or person in this landscape, and the TV world will pop up, you don't know much about them, you have to learn everything. So, probably for about, I would say a solid like eight to 10 months I was doing straight research. I had heard the name Warren Littlefield, and all of these executives, but I didn't know who they were. So, I had to just read everything about them and find out who they were, their relationships to other executives, the people that worked for them, their impact on show, just all of these different things.

Brandon Tartikoff was the one who greenlit this show. And I didn't know anything about him. He's the one who did not cancel Seinfeld when it was struggling in the first two years. He got Bill Cosby to write a pilot, and he's the one who greenlit the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He’s an incredibly important figure.

All of these people who I kind of heard of, and you see their names in the credits, you got to learn who they are. And one of the reasons the book was so research intensive is because I like to do origin stories. So, when the show came out, outside of Will and a little bit with Alfonso Ribeiro who was on Silver Spoons, I didn't know any of the actors. I never heard of any of them. And I thought they were the people that they played on TV, but they weren't.

Everyone has an origin story, everyone is from somewhere. I like to tell people's stories from the beginning. So when I introduce each actor into the book, I always start from the beginning of their story, whether it's Karyn Parsons, who grew up in Santa Monica and had a crush on Lenny Kravitz, or if it was James Avery, who was kind of a hippie who left the Army and he moved to San Diego then he moved to Silver Lake - I love people's stories, so that's one of the things I try to dive into in the book.

Sadie: Going into the writing side of the show itself and speaking with writers like Rob Edwards, what kind of questions were you asking that would be important to your book?

Chris: Rob Edwards, Devon Shepard, Bill Boulware, all these guys who I talked to – I initially started with, because each of these guys is significant, because they wrote some of the best episodes – I’d say, ‘tell me about the process of you writing this episode’ or ‘how did it come together?’ ‘What was the pushback?’ ‘What was the feeling in the room?’ ‘What did the actors say?’ ‘How much is taken from real life?’

And they kind of broke down day by day, from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, rehearsals, rewrites show night, everything. I just went through everything with each one of them. And then also, we were talking about origin stories, ‘What is your starting point? How did you get involved in writing?’ So that you have a better sense of who these people are, why they wrote these episodes, so you can have sort of a stronger sense for what these shows actually mean.

Sadie: Going off of that into your writing journey, how did you start up to this point and writing this very specific book?

Chris: Pretty much started as a writer because my mom was a writer, my dad was an economics professor, and he wrote a couple of economics books - but my mom was more of a creative writer, and she was also a journalist. She used to be a country music writer, like way back in the day, I used to go to concerts with her and she would get free records, and I would just listen to them with her while she would write reviews and stuff like that. So, I just kind of like gravitated to that and automatically wanted to write not knowing what kind of writing I wanted to do.

I was a big basketball fan, like every kid, I wanted to make it to the NBA - didn't quite happen, there's still time. [laughs] And so I said, ‘OK, well, I'll make it to the NBA another way. I'll be a writer.’ And so that's exactly what I did. I went to school at Howard and got my communications journalism degree. And right out of school, got hired by ESPN, I was there for 15 years, and it was great. I got to do exactly what I set out to do.

And then I started writing books somewhere in there. I kind of wanted to branch out, because I had always done sports books, but there wasn't a project like this one. When you write a sports book or sports feature, the process is pretty much the same. You do your research, you do your interviews, you create a report, you ask unique, different questions, you get unique, different stories. And then you write it - it's pretty much the same. So, I've just applied everything I learned through sports writing to this. And I think it worked out pretty good!

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Sadie: I think so too! For budding TV writers do you see this book being a writing tool or resource in their arsenal?

Chris: I think if someone's starting out, and they're doing TV writing, basically, anything you read, it gives you a sort of insight into what a writer’s room is like, and how things work. The sort of chain of command, and the processes, the more you know, the better always. And I do talk a lot about that in the book, because I wanted to focus on the writers, because writers are the foundation of a show. They're the ones that make it go - Will and James Avery and Karyn Parsons didn't come up with the ideas, the writers did. The writers create the shows that we love and remember forever. So yeah, I think if someone wants a better understanding of how to do it, how it works and the relationships, they definitely, I think, get something out of this book, for sure.

Sadie: What do you hope is the biggest takeaway for your readers?

Chris: The legacy of the show, because a lot of people might read the book, and they never watched the show originally - you have the group that I'm in who watched the show when it first came on - or they watched it in syndication, and have young folks, who maybe their introduction to Fresh Prince was like a meme - Will standing in the living room by himself in the last episode, where he's doing some kind of dance - maybe that's their introduction, or maybe the TV show Bel Air, which I really love. I just I want people to take away that the show has a lasting, enduring legacy, and what it meant to so many people, people love this show. I was talking to Lebron James and he was like the father episode, “Papa's Got a Brand New Excuse” That's his favorite TV episode of all time. He was so moved by it.

It has a profound effect on a lot of people, but that's what I kind of want people to know how important the show was to many, many people, and just how it reveals so much of different slices of Black America and culture. And it's an enduring show – it came on, I think 32 years ago, and we're still talking about it today.

The Fresh Prince Project: How the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Remixed America is published by Atria Books and is now available.