A follow-up to A Different World is reportedly in the works at Netflix, after being stalled by the legal issues that surrounded the Cosby Show spinoff’s creator, Bill Cosby, from 2015 to 2021.
A Different World ran from September 1987 to July 1993 on NBC, and followed Lisa Bonet’s Cosby Show character, Denise Huxtable, as she attended Hillman College, a fictional HBCU. Following Bonet’s exit after one season, the sitcom pivoted to focus on the characters of Dwayne and Whitley (played by Kadeem Hardison and Jasmine Guy).
Dwayne and Whitley wound up betting married, and in the original series’ penultimate episode, they discovered that they were expecting their first child.
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The sequel series in the works at Netflix, per our sister site Deadline, will follow the couple’s youngest daughter as she attends Hillman College. (Netflix declined to comment on the trade’s reporting, and did not immediately reply to TVLine’s own request for comment.)
The prospective follow-up hails from writer/executive producer Felicia Pride (Bel-Air, Grey’s Anatomy) and fellow EPs Debbie Allen, Mandy Summers, Tom Werner, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Bythewood.
Allen, a showrunner, producer and director on NBC’s A Different World, said in a March 2021 THR Q&A, “We’ve been wanting to do [the sequel series] forever,” but, “Honestly, it’s strapped behind the whole situation with Mr. [Bill] Cosby — which is unfortunate.”
Cosby was convicted in 2018 for sexual assault, and had served less than three years of a three-to-10 prison sentence when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned said conviction in June 2021.
A Different World “was his idea,” Allen told THR, but there is “a studio and network situation where they can’t allow any money to go into his company. [And] you can’t take somebody’s name off of a show.
“A Different World needs to have a second life, and we know how to do it,” she asserted.
Would you watch a Netflix series about Whitley and Dwayne’s kid at Hillman? Weigh in below!
