Primetime Playa

It was Quincy who first made me feel as though I might actually be up to this task, or at least wouldn't hideously humiliate myself trying. Quincy, who was in his late 50s at the time, wasn't the likeliest candidate to "get" hip-hop either—particularly Will's brand, which had been pitched mainly to teenyboppers. But Quincy saw a similarity between the bebop artists he came of age with and the rappers his children were listening to. Both beboppers and rappers shared a delight in a secret language that they had created, an outsider language designed to piss off an establishment that couldn't understand it. Quincy spoke about the duality of the rappers, in whom street bravado coexisted with poetry. As Quincy went on about duality, I noticed that Will had nonchalantly seated himself at Quincy's baby grand and begun playing the opening measures of Beethoven's "Fur Elise." This project was starting to seem kind of cool.

I got to work: The concept the network had agreed to involved Will moving in with a bunch of wealthy relatives in Bel-Air (Quincy's neighborhood). My near-total ignorance of hip-hop slang and culture turned out to be an asset, oddly enough, when creating the characters of Will's ultra-preppy cousins, Carlton and Hillary, whose cluelessness helped fuel much of Will's comedy. Having Will define then-current slang terms such as "stupid" and "dope" for his Bel-Air relatives was a convenient way to explain those terms to an equally clueless white audience––this was 1990, after all, long before the Pillsbury Dough Boy started rapping in commercials. When it came time to write the ending of the pilot, I felt as though it had already been written for me. In the final scene, after Will's Princeton-educated uncle excoriates him for being a good-for-nothing street kid, Will sits down at his uncle's baby grand and plays the first few bars of "Fur Elise." Fade out.