Debbie Allen Looks Back on "A Different World"

[JamesG]

Debbie Allen was a producer and a director on the college-set "Cosby Show" spin-off, which she joined in Season 2.

“I had been brought in to take the show and make it culturally relevant, and that was something I knew about,” she says. “I went to Howard University, so I knew what a historically Black college ought to look like, smell like, feel like, taste like and act like.”



Eventually, the show’s Powers That Be “wanted me to play the dean, and I said, ‘You know what? There’s somebody better than me, and I brought in Jenifer Lewis, and Jenifer Lewis was amazing as the dean,” she says.

But when Whitley needed a therapist, Allen relax!-relate!-release!’d her way into one of the show’s best-known scenes. “Jasmine Guy actually had been one of my dancers on Fame. So I played her psychiatrist, and it was just the most fun part. And everybody loved [Dr. Langhorne] so much that I came back a couple of times.”

https://tvline.com/lists/debbie-alle...fferent-world/