Wish upon a screen

  The sitcoms you watched in your formative years tended to mirror the family unit you wished you had. For many American families that didn't represent the nuclear family, sitcoms were aspirational. Families stuck together no matter what – except for the characters who were written off shows like they never existed – and always hugged it out at the end of the episode. For Black millennials, there are sitcoms that tap into our unfulfilled desires or, as I will call it, wish fulfillment for an idealized family unit, wealth and privilege, and generally being regarded as “cool.”
  There's the show we all love because it's a good show: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. […]
  Philip Banks was the stern, lovable father we'd seen countless variations of on TV before – but this one was Black. And wealthy, not because of a job in entertainment or because his blue-collar business blew up like George and Weezy's, but because he was a prominent, well-respected judge. The Jeffersons represented the so-called American Dream that we're all constantly striving for, but Fresh Prince existed in a world where Black people were able to thrive as equally as their white peers. Or so it would seem. […]
  On Fresh Prince, the theme song introduced Will Smith as the audience's surrogate, an everyman who found himself transported to the kingdom of Bel-Air. If only we could all be plucked from our circumstances and sent to live in a mansion in Bel-Air, complete with a butler. After one fight in his hometown of Philadelphia, Will was shipped off to live with his rich family relatives (“I got in one little fight and my mom got scared. And said, you're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air”). […]
  Fresh Prince holds up incredibly well on rewatch not only because it's funny, but because it taps into the desire most Americans have for a strong family. […] When you watch the Banks family on TV, you wish they were your parents, not just because they live in a mansion, but because there's a sense of a mother and a father with a strong moral compass. Things I didn't have, things I didn't know I craved.