Hangin' with Mr. Cooper
Mark Curry as an ex-NBA player turned substitute teacher in Oakland, first as a roommate comedy and then, on TGIF, as a family show with Nell Carter running the school and a young Raven-Symoné in the house. The Friday-night sitcom that was a love letter to its star's hometown.
Hangin' with Mr. Cooper premiered on ABC on September 22, 1992, airing on Tuesdays after Full House. Both shows came from Jeff Franklin, and both were set in the Bay Area, but Mr. Cooper was Oakland because Mark Curry was. Curry, born there in 1961, had landed an HBO special after opening for Damon Wayans in his first week in Los Angeles, and he has said the show grew out of one conversation with Franklin: "Man, I would love to be a hooper, I am a basketball player," and the two came up with the idea together. The pilot was shot on the Seaver family's Growing Pains set, and Curry recalls having to bring his own clothes.
Mark Cooper was a former NBA player working as a substitute teacher and gym coach, sharing a house with two women: Vanessa Russell, played by Holly Robinson, and Robin Dumars, played by Dawnn Lewis. The first-season theme, "Hangin' with My Man," was sung by Lewis and Robinson with En Vogue. That version lasted one season. When the show moved to Fridays and joined the TGIF lineup in September 1993, Lewis was gone, Mark's cousin Geneva (Saundra Quarterman) and her daughter Nicole (Raven-Symoné) moved in, and Nell Carter arrived as P.J. Moore, the demanding principal at Mark's school. Vanessa went from roommate to girlfriend to fiancée over the run.
Curry has described the goal plainly: "I just wanted to bring my community up... I tried to be a positive image on television." The show stayed on TGIF through the spring of 1996, then sat out a full year before a shortened fifth season of thirteen episodes ran on Saturdays in the summer of 1997, ending on August 30. Five seasons and 101 episodes in all.
It lived on the way the TGIF shows do, in syndication from 1996, on TNN and TEENick in the early 2000s, and later on Hulu and HBO Max alongside Family Matters, Full House and Step by Step. Curry, who also hosted It's Showtime at the Apollo in the early 1990s, was decades later still pitching a revival on camera: "We want to bring Mr. Cooper back, so if you are out there, producers, let's do this."
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