Cornell Young IV did not tell his family he had landed a lead role in Netflix’s A Different World sequel until he was about to leave to shoot the pilot. “Sometimes, you got to sit with it with yourself. It was just me and God,” the actor said in an interview published on Friday, October 16. The same interview called his twin brother, David, his biggest fan, and clips of the brothers have been circulating this week as the show’s first season keeps finding viewers.
Young plays Shaquille “Five Star” Johnson, a star quarterback who pulls onto the Hillman College campus in a Lamborghini about five minutes into the premiere. He is also the son of Ron Johnson, the character Darryl M. Bell played on the original NBC sitcom and plays again here, which makes Young one of the bridges between the 1987 cast and the new one.
From wide receiver to Hillman
Young grew up in St. Louis, one of seven children, and went to McKendree University as a wide receiver. Acting started as a counterweight to marketing classes. In a Netflix interview he compared himself to the basketball-and-musicals lead of High School Musical: “I was real-life Troy Bolton,” he said, recalling football teammates sitting in the front row of his plays trying to make him laugh.
His screen résumé is short. His first booked TV job was the Netflix teen romance Forever, and he also appears in Tyler Perry’s Netflix project Doing Life. A Different World is his first series-regular role. He has said he was binge-watching the original in early 2024 and wishing for a show like it, and that news of the revival broke about three months later. When his agent asked which part he wanted, his answer was only Shaquille.
The call that settled it came from the person who reshaped the original show. “Debbie Allen calling me, ‘Hey, is this Cornell? This is Debbie Allen.’ I’m like, ‘This is crazy,'” Young said of the chemistry-read stage. Allen, a Howard University graduate, was brought in after the first season of the 1987 series to make Hillman feel like a real historically Black college. She produced 122 episodes of the original, directed 83, and directed the sequel’s premiere.
Fourteen years from tweet to Season 2
The revival took longer to arrive than the original run lasted. Our timeline of how it came together:
- August 2012: Allen posts that she wants to reboot the series.
- Early 2024: the original cast reunites and begins a 10-city tour of HBCUs to encourage enrollment.
- August 7, 2024: a Netflix sequel about Whitley and Dwayne’s daughter is reported in development, with Felicia Pride as writer.
- March 28, 2025: Netflix orders a pilot.
- December 2025: Jasmine Guy, Kadeem Hardison, Cree Summer and Bell are confirmed to return, with Maleah Joi Moon as their screen daughter Deborah.
- September 24, 2026: all 10 half-hour episodes premiere, exactly 39 years after the original’s September 24, 1987 debut.
- October 2, 2026: Netflix renews the show for Season 2.
That last step came eight days after launch. Pride credited fans for what she called a “swift Season 2 pickup,” and said the series had made the Netflix English TV Top 10. The original’s six NBC seasons ran 144 episodes; the sequel has 10 so far.
The stakes are cultural as well as commercial. During the original run from 1987 to 1993, enrollment at historically Black colleges and universities rose 24%, and many viewers have cited the show as a reason they enrolled. Allen goes further, claiming in Netflix’s launch material that the show “tripled the enrollment” of those schools, far beyond the 24% rise recorded in federal education statistics for those years.
What Season 2 holds for Shaquille
Season 1 left Shaquille grieving his late mother, whose dying wish sent him to Hillman, and caught between Deborah and his father, who is also his manager. Young said the character’s tangle with Deborah is a lesson in talking things through: “Just having an honest conversation can help you avoid so much.” Netflix says Season 2 follows the class into sophomore year with a “new year, new me” attitude. No release date has been set.
Further reading
Image: Library of Congress Life (Shawn Miller), CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
