Hilary Banks is leaving the mansion! Peacock is developing Hilary, a Bel-Air spinoff built around Coco Jones and the character she carried for four seasons. Tracy Oliver, the writer behind Girls Trip and Harlem, is penning the project.
Nothing is ordered yet. The show is in development, which means Peacock likes the pitch enough to pay for a script but has not committed to a season. There is no release date, no cast beyond Jones, and no Bel-Air season 5 coming alongside it. If Hilary gets the green light, Bel-Air becomes the first Peacock scripted original to spawn a spinoff.
The premise sends Hilary Banks across the country. She takes an unexpected job from celebrity chef Yvonne Durand and impulsively moves to New York, “determined to prove herself beyond her Bel-Air connections,” according to the logline. The catch is that the city charges for everything. Success, friendship, and love all come with a bill she did not plan for.
That setup pulls directly from the arc Jones built on the mothership. Her Hilary started Bel-Air as an influencer and pivoted into the culinary world. By the final season she was a working chef, absent for a stretch of episodes while she processed the sudden death of her new husband.
Here is the wrinkle. The Bel-Air series finale had Hilary come home from Costa Rica to Los Angeles and open her own cafe. The spinoff quietly rewrites that landing. Instead, it lines up with the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air finale, where Karyn Parsons’ Hilary took her talk show to New York. In that sense, Hilary is as much a Fresh Prince spinoff as a Bel-Air one.
So the reimagining is circling back to the source material for its next chapter. That is a smart move. New York gives Hilary a stage that has nothing to do with Uncle Phil’s money or the Banks name, which is the entire point of the character’s growth.
Oliver is new to the franchise, and she is the right hire. Her track record with Girls Trip, Little, The Blackening, and Harlem is Black women in big cities figuring out work, money, and love without losing their humor. That is the exact lane Hilary needs to run in.
Coco Jones executive produces alongside Oliver, Will Smith, Terence Carter, David Boorstein, and Miguel Melendez of Westbrook Studios. Benny Medina, Andy Borowitz, Susan Borowitz, Morgan Cooper, the Jeff Pollack trust, and the Quincy Jones estate round out the producer list. Westbrook Studios and Universal Television, the studios behind Bel-Air, produce.
Bel-Air premiered on Peacock on February 13, 2022, as the streamer’s first real breakout. It grew out of Morgan Cooper’s fan film, which reframed the 1990s sitcom as a drama, and it starred newcomer Jabari Banks as Will. The show wrapped its four-season run in December with a planned finale and no cliffhangers.
Jones was one of its clearest wins. She came into the series as a Disney Channel alum from So Random and Let It Shine, and she leaves it a Grammy winner for “ICU” and a lead with her own title card.
For years, Black actresses have been the breakout on ensemble shows and then watched the spinoff go to someone else. Hilary flips that. It takes the character fans latched onto, gives her a writer who understands her, and lets her carry the franchise into a new city on her own name. Peacock just has to actually order it.
- REAVES // @fisher.reaves