Finally, after 30 years, an appreciation of one of the all-time Top 5 supporting sitcom characters, the great Carlton Banks:
There’s a reason Carlton Banks stands out after 30 years, aside from being responsible for a dance so iconic that it was recently at the center of a lawsuit against Fortnite. The tension between Carlton and Will was the tension at the heart of the show. Carlton was the more complex character because he wasn’t as easy to digest or categorize. But even if you disagreed with his politics or wanted to slap the haughtiness out of him, you were able to empathize with him. Love Carlton Banks or hate him, he was genuine.
Carlton’s comfort with himself rubbed some people the wrong way. It was one thing that his cousin—who loved him, all jokes aside—made fun of him. It was something else entirely when he was being humiliated by an outsider out of spite. In “Blood Is Thicker Than Mud,” from the show’s fourth season, Will and Carlton pledged to join the fictional Black fraternity Phi Beta Gamma. Carlton was hazed worse than his fellow pledges and ultimately denied entry to the organization because Top Dog (Glenn Plummer) took offense to pretty much everything about him. “I’m not accepting no prep-school, Bel-Air-bred sellout into my fraternity,” he told Carlton. In his eyes, Carlton didn’t reflect Phi Beta Gamma’s values because of his background. “He saw Carlton as a guy who escaped the reality of being Black,” says producer and screenwriter Devon Shepard, who wrote the episode.
Whole article is fantastic.
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