Six seasons of American sitcom "A Different World" graced the airwaves of NBC in the early 2000s. One of the main characters in the original series was Denise Huxtable, a fictional college student at Hillman College, a historically black institution of higher learning in Virginia. It was mainly Whitley Gilbert and Dwayne Wayne who took center stage in the second season after Bonet's departure from the first. In the series, members of historically significant historically black fraternities and sororities were regularly represented. If The Cosby Show writers had avoided certain topics, A Different World would address them instead. When the AIDS pandemic first broke out in the United States in the early 1990s, this show was a pioneer in addressing it.