My new book, From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter—and Win, is out.
A few weeks ago Netflix brought us back to Hillman. The new A Different World premiered on September 24, thirty-nine years to the day after the original first aired on NBC, and it follows Dwayne and Whitley's daughter Deborah as she starts her freshman year at her parents' alma mater. I watched it the way I suspect a lot of you did, half invested in the new kids and half waiting for Kadeem Hardison and Jasmine Guy to walk back onto that campus.
I came to the original in a house that didn't let much TV in. We lived on the eastern end of Long Island, and for much of my early childhood we didn't have cable, just an antenna that pulled in a couple of channels. We could watch TV on weekends, but only one weeknight, and that night was Thursday, which meant The Cosby Show and then A Different World. We had a proud working-class Black community where I grew up, but not many Black folks who had gone to college. And here was Hillman, a whole university that was Black—from the people who made the food to the people who ran the place, the professors teaching the classes, and the students in them. Some of them were working-class kids like the ones I knew and some were from families whose names were on the buildings. I rooted for those characters. I learned a range of archetypes I hadn't met in real life yet, and I got to see Blackness through a wider lens than my everyday world gave me. No show is perfect, but for those of us who didn't grow up in Atlanta or Philadelphia or New York or Los Angeles, where Black people were in charge of things, it really was a different world.
I love a throwback. I love it in music and I love it in clothes. Somewhere out there is a light brown leather jacket I thrifted in my early twenties and wore with the collar popped, and I still miss it. So I understand the pull of a reboot. We are living through a lot of them right now, revivals and sequels and codas that promise to tell us what happened next and how everybody turned out. But I've been wondering what we're actually reaching for when we gravitate towards the past.
Part of the answer, I think, is that we're reaching for institutions. A show that millions watched at the same hour every week and talked about the next morning was a kind of institution in itself, and A Different World was exactly that.
It was also about an institution. Hillman is fictional, but what it stood for is very real. HBCUs and other Black institutions don't simply provide a campus or an education. They are places where people encounter and grapple with their history, build the relationships and networks that carry them through life, develop an identity and a political consciousness, and imagine who they might become. For a generation of us, this sitcom made that world visible, and it sent many people to HBCUs looking for that experience. It created appreciation—and demand.
So it means something that this show returns at the exact moment when Black institutions are under attack, under pressure and facing generational setbacks. And it's not just the institutions, but the cultural norms that help us understand why they matter. The attacks on DEI, the attacks on teaching Black history, the fights over funding for public schools and higher education, the pressure on libraries and museums and public media, the attacks on journalists, the consolidation of who owns what we watch and read, and, of course, the steady erosion of the rules that protect the vote. Each of these has its own coalition and its own news cycle, so we might perceive them as separate fights. But they are one fight: a fight about the institutions through which people (Black people especially) learn who they are, what they deserve, what happened before them, and what they might become and do together.
Watching the new Hillman, I kept noticing how differently it's built. The original ran more than twenty episodes a season, shot on a stage with multiple cameras in front of a live audience. The new one is ten half-hour episodes, single camera, all released at once. It's more of the moment, since “single camera” pulls you into an intimacy with the main character that the original never required, but it's also in some ways a loss. On the old Hillman you could be deeply invested in Whitley and Dwayne and Freddie and Ron all at once, and you felt the scale of the place, the sense that the world was bigger than any one person in it, that it was a show about a group of people, a community, and not a main character.
I've rewatched the original many times as an adult, and what strikes me now is how much it captured the times it was made in, the challenges and the politics and the limits of what could be said on network television. My time at GLADD taught me that watching which stories travel and which ones don't tells you a great deal about a culture, its politics, and its nuances.
Debbie Allen and her team (who shaped the original A Different World) understood that. When a show like theirs gets something on the air that wasn't there before, it changes both the floor and the ceiling for what’s possible. It changes what writers believe they can pitch, what producers believe they can make, and what people in the writers' room believe is worth fighting for.
Of course, the differences in the new show are less about the show and more about the industry and how television gets made now. TV is evolving and shows are built for people watching on their phones, or with one eye on their phones. A season that once lasted from September to May now fits snugly into a single weekend.
I don't want to overly romanticize the old network rules, which kept plenty of stories off that campus that I would have been changed by being able to see as a kid. In this current era, a reboot can take on things it wouldn't have before, like sex and divorce and queer life, doing so with less trepidation and more honesty than decades before.
But while it's evolved in substance, TV has shrunk in execution. When cable broke open what three networks used to control, we got stories that never would have made it onto NBC on a Thursday night. Pedro Zamora on The Real World put a young, gay, HIV-positive man into millions of living rooms in a way no network would have risked. Streaming opened that door even further.
But what worries me about this moment is that the door is closing again. The companies that own what we watch keep merging into fewer and bigger ones, and a show can find a huge audience and still be cut after a season, which rarely happened to a network hit once it had found its viewers. There is less room to go big and less opportunity to experiment, and less access for those wanting to create the sprawling, many-voiced worlds that let us see ourselves as part of a community. Who owns the infrastructure decides whose stories get to be big, and right now ownership is moving in the wrong direction.
This goes back to the core of my book From Presence to Power (It's right there in the title.) For a long time, one way we measured progress was presence. Are Black people on television? Are Black students being admitted? Is Black history being taught? Are Black executives in the room?
It's not that these questions are irrelevant. Presence matters, and visibility matters, as we learned through cultural touchstones like the original A Different World. Two young writers on that show, Reggie Rock Bythewood and Gina Prince-Bythewood, met each other there on their first professional jobs. Nearly forty years later, they're executive producers of the new one. That's what it looks like when presence turns into power over time, when the people who got in the door end up with a say over what gets made.
But this moment is exposing the limits of presence without infrastructure and power behind it. Getting Black history into a curriculum is a real win, but it's often a fleeting one. It can be undone the minute power shifts, unless we've built enough power to protect it. Getting Black stories produced is a real win. But those stories will stay fragile as long as they depend on a handful of corporate owners instead of a media ecosystem where Black creators, workers and audiences have leverage of their own.
What Hillman always conveyed is that the institution outlasts any single graduating class. In the reboot, Deborah's whole story begins because her parents' generation built something that was still there for her. She's struggling to break free of it and also to honor it.
That's the work in front of us now, protecting what we've built and building on it to ensure we have what we'll need, because in the end what we have is each other, and institutions help us hold on through generations.
Rashad
