The Everybody Show
How Bill Cosby built the on-screen family of America’s dreams
“Hard to get good help, isn’t it?” Heathcliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby) gently picks his way through the minefield of detritus that is his teenage son’s bedroom floor, displacing a small mountain of dirty clothing to create a tiny perch on the bed. Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) has come home with a report card of Cs and Ds, and his father has been dispatched upstairs to explain the future consequences of poor grades.
Theo insists that unlike his father the doctor and his mother the lawyer, he only wants to be a regular person, with a regular job. Cliff pulls out a packet of Monopoly money, prompted to teach his son an impromptu lesson in economics. Doling out $1,200 in monthly pay to Theo, Cliff begins taking it back: $350 in taxes (because “the government comes for the regular people first”), $400 for a Manhattan apartment (Theo, taking back $200: “I’ll live in New Jersey!”), $300 for a car (Theo takes back $100, claiming he’ll ride a motorbike instead; Cliff reclaims $50 for the helmet), $200 for clothes and shoes (at Theo’s insistence: “I want to look good”). “What does that leave you with?” “Two hundred dollars,” crows Theo, beaming at having avoided his father’s rhetorical flourish, “so no problem!” “There is a problem,” Cliff observes through gritted teeth. “You haven’t eaten yet.” Theo announces he is capable of getting by on baloney and cereal, and Cliff unsheathes his final saber: “You plan to have a girlfriend?” He takes the rest of his Monopoly money.
Theo, still unsettled on the subject, asks his father later in the episode to accept him as he is, flaws and all. “Maybe I was born to be a regular person, and live a regular life. . . . If you weren’t a doctor, I wouldn’t love you less, because you’re my dad. Maybe you can just accept who I am and love me anyway, because I’m your son.” The studio audience warmly applauds his sentiment. Another hoary sitcom trope has been trotted out, and Bill Cosby, old pro of television cliché, waits for the clapping to die down before rising out of his seat. “Theo,” he calls out, “that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life!” Not content to leave it there, Cliff shifts into an even higher gear of rhetorical ire: “I am your father. I brought you in this world, and I’ll take you out.” Papa don’t take no mess; The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–92), as its title unabashedly indicates, was all about Cliff. Bill Cosby became television’s most famous father by undercutting all the lazy politesse of the sitcom, and he begins right here, in the very first episode.
Cosby, a stand-up comic and a TV star for two decades, was weary of television’s stale clichés. “I don’t want to see one more car moving sideways down the street for two blocks — passing a (white) hooker talking to a black pimp — before crashing into a building in front of a man who drops to his knees with a .357 magnum. End of story,” he said. Instead, he proposed a detective series about an investigator who never pulled his gun while solving cases. The networks passed, and Cosby returned with a new series idea based on the domestic observation of his stand-up work. “There’s a war going on here between parents and children,” he told NBC executives, according to then–network VP Warren Littlefield, “and we parents have no intention of losing.” The show was originally to be called The New, Improved Bill Cosby Show, and marketed like a soda or a deodorant.
After a lengthy detour away from family life, toward workplaces, passels of friends, and childless couples, the sitcom had returned home, aping the format and reassuring feel of the classic 1950s series while updating their content for the go-go 1980s. Nuclear families — amiable father, no-nonsense mother, lovably perky children — were back in vogue, products, in one fashion or another, of Ronald Reagan’s conservative resurgence. Instead of having their milk money swiped by bullies, these kids were having sex and getting arrested, but Dad (and Mom too, if in slightly blurrier focus) was still bailing them out of trouble. The guardianship of children was now a full-time occupation; sitcom parents’ primary purpose was to inculcate positive values and steer their kids away from ever-present danger.
The 1980s were the era of fatherhood resurgent. Father knew best once more, reigning from living room couch thrones, wielding kitchen-table scepters. (Weren’t all of these fathers, in one way or another, reflections of that ultimate father as protector, the Gipper himself?) These fathers were kinder, softer presences than their predecessors, signaled by their Mr. Rogers–esque sartorial and grooming choices. Cliff had his garish sweaters, Family Ties’ Steven Keaton (Michael Gross) his salt-and-pepper beard, and Dr. Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke) of Growing Pains had his array of sensitive-man cardigans and turtlenecks. Parents and children were allies and rivals all at once.
The soft-pedaled conflict of these new family sitcoms was between the old generation and the new. Family Ties pitted former hippie parents against children wholly uninterested in changing the world for the better. In the show’s first episode, the Keatons revel in a slideshow of their 1960s activist days while their children are horrified by their gauche outfits and political causes. “The ’60s are over, Dad,” their son Alex, played with tweed-jacket-and-tie panache by Michael J. Fox, bluntly informs his father, and the sense of gently clashing sensibilities informs the show. The parents meant well, espousing all the liberal platitudes television preferred to peddle, but Young Republican Alex (one of whose girlfriends would be played by future Friends star Courteney Cox) was entirely preferable as comic company.
Although Alex Keaton would likely have found a cold shoulder in the Huxtable home, on first view there is little that might distinguish The Cosby Show from contemporaries such as Family Ties and Growing Pains. The setup of the show’s pilot — aimless son runs headfirst into the hard-fought wisdom of worldly father — could have been imported from any other sitcom not only of its time but of the time of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Future episodes would be devoted to the similarly gentle scrapes of not only Theo but also his older sisters Sondra (Sabrina Le Beauf) and Denise (Lisa Bonet) and younger sisters Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe) and Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam). The innovation of The Cosby Show was, paradoxically, to be found in how utterly ordinary its plotlines were: dead goldfish and adolescent scrapes and meandering life lessons from Dad.
It is Cosby, and to a slightly lesser extent, Phylicia Rashad’s Claire Huxtable, who anchor the show, with a no-nonsense attitude to child-rearing and, by extension, sitcom-building. Cliff and Claire are more irascible than their sitcom forebears, more willing to turn their rapier wit on their children. Cliff Huxtable is sweet and sharp and exasperating in equal measure — so effortlessly brilliant that it is only too easy to lose sight of how consistently good Rashad is as well. Their middle-class ordinariness endeared the series to average Americans who might otherwise have been uncomfortable with the series’ unique twist: This sitcom family was African American.
Little took place on The Cosby Show that had not happened on dozens of other shows countless times before, but the sheer fact of the Huxtables being who they were made it notable and worthy.
By the time of The Cosby Show’s premiere in 1984, Bill Cosby was already a legendary figure in television history. He had been the first African American star of a prime-time drama series with the gently charming spy show I Spy (NBC, 1965–68). Cosby was the comic foil for partner Robert Culp, but I Spy was notable for its distinctly unpatronizing tone toward Cosby. Cosby was a master of heavy-lidded comic understatement, coiled violence and coiled humor in the same tightly wound package. (Cosby won three Emmys for best actor in a drama series for I Spy, rendering it all the more astonishing that not only did he never win an Emmy for playing Cliff Huxtable, he was never even nominated.) Even at this early moment, Cosby’s story was intertwining with that of the sitcom; in the episode “It’s All Done with Mirrors,” he tangles with a scenery-chewing Manchurian Candidate–style brainwashing expert, played with gleeful affect by that fellow future sitcom icon, Carroll O’Connor. One would not have expected Cliff Huxtable and Archie Bunker to meet under such circumstances.
Cosby went on to headline the first sitcom named after an African American performer, The Bill Cosby Show (NBC, 1969–71), becoming the first African American man to star in a sitcom since Amos ’n’ Andy’s Tim Moore. Bill Cosby was demonstrably more multicultural and diverse than the shows that had preceded it on television, with Cosby playing dashiki-clad Chet Kincaid, a physical education teacher at a Los Angeles high school who persistently finds himself embroiled in others’ imbroglios.
In the show’s first episode, a small gem of the kind of shaggy dog storytelling that would become a Cliff Huxtable staple, Chet sets out for a jog, answers a ringing pay phone, and finds himself in pursuit of a man named Calvin. Chet is simultaneously being hunted by the police, who suspect him in a string of robberies. In another episode, Chet is in search of a new valve needle to blow up his saggy basketballs and must negotiate the thicket of educational bureaucracy in order to acquire one. He eventually commandeers the school’s janitor to move a file cabinet in order to procure the necessary requisition form before learning that furniture moving, too, requires a special form.
Bill Cosby’s star is its beleaguered voice of reason, his innate decency shining through even when blustering through an algebra class as a substitute, or when bachelor Chet must face a sex education class of inquisitive girls, telling them that he only believes in taking the pill when he has a headache (Mary Richards would likely have offered different advice). Like its far more famous successor, The Bill Cosby Show is anecdotal, low-key, and inclined toward the mundane. Cosby, at his best when interacting with children, is cast as a teacher so that he can offer wickedly realistic counsel to an array of troubled adolescents.
For The Cosby Show, the star collaborated with Ed Weinberger, who had co-created Taxi (and before that, The Bill Cosby Show) and written for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The Cosby Show team also included Jay Sandrich, who had directed the bulk of the episodes of both MTM and Soap. Weinberger and Sandrich’s presence alongside Cosby ensured that The Cosby Show was a veteran enterprise from the outset. It also meant that something of Mary Tyler Moore’s character setup, an ensemble piece revolving around a single unchanging protagonist, was imported to The Cosby Show. Mary Richards, meet Cliff Huxtable.
Originally, the Huxtables were to be a working-class family, with Cliff a driver and Claire a plumber. With no pilot or script to show, Cosby’s representatives shopped the series to ABC. The network rejected it, and NBC swooped in to pick up the Cosby vehicle. In the process, Cliff and Claire became white-collar professionals — Cliff an obstetrician, Claire an attorney — with Cosby seeking the advice of the OB/GYN who delivered his five children for crafting the character of Dr. Huxtable. The new show was to be filmed in New York, near Cosby’s home, and not in Los Angeles, where most sitcoms were made. “I’d like to be canceled a little closer to my home this time,” said Cosby.
Like almost every other sitcom of its era, The Cosby Show was drastically limited in its physical scope: the living room and kitchen, with occasional detours to the bedrooms upstairs. A traditional multicamera sitcom, The Cosby Show’s setup required flat, even lighting. Eschewing so much of the film director’s traditional palette, sitcoms are a writer’s and performer’s medium, requiring acting and dialogue to do the work that lighting and camera movement cannot. But Cosby’s penchant for physical comedy and his storyteller’s flair are built into the foundation of the series.
Cliff is forever recounting and recreating his adventures outside the house: begging to make a purchase at the electronics store after his wife forbids the proprietors from selling to him, or taking Theo to an army recruiting office as punishment after an out-of-control party at their house, encountering other parents with ropes around their children’s necks or guns cocked in their pockets. The show leaves ample room for Cosby to show off his physical gifts, whether he is sneezing directly into a box of tissues or slowly, carefully lowering himself onto a couch as a pregnant man in the fantasy episode “The Day the Spores Landed.” (He eventually gives birth to a ten-foot hoagie, followed in short order by a bottle of soda.)
Cliff and Claire are near-ideal parents, but much of The Cosby Show is devoted to the sheer maddening frustration of parenthood. In the very first episode of the series, Claire confronts her husband at the front door as soon as he comes home: “Cliff, why do we have four children?” (She hasn’t lost track of the number; in the pilot, Sondra had yet to be added to the cast.) When Theo wonders how to be alone, his father offers a simple formula: “Get a job, get a house, get married, and have no children.” When Denise, unsure about attending college, pontificates at length about learning from the university of life, Cliff observes sagely, “I understand that some of its graduates go on to move back with their parents.”
In an episode from the first season, Cliff jokes that his name should officially be changed to “Dad-Can-I,” in order to simplify matters for his children and their incessant demands. “The United States of America is a wonderful place,” Cliff complains, “but they don’t have anything where you can get rid of your kid.” In the episode “The Shirt Story,” Theo enthuses about the quality materials and design of a dress shirt he covets, and Cliff wearily asks, interrupting his son’s consumerist aria, “How much?”
Cosby is regularly paired with the gifted Malcolm-Jamal Warner as his foil. In the episode “Independence Day,” Theo gets an earring, and as Cliff maneuvers to catch a glimpse of the illicit jewelry, father and son lean back in tandem until they are practically supine. Cliff and Theo have a similar hide-and-seek dynamic in an episode early in the series’ second season, when Cliff drapes himself over Theo’s shoulder, curious about what is captivating his son’s attention inside the refrigerator.
Cosby and Warner have superb chemistry and execute a seemingly infinite series of variations on the theme of disappointed father and disappointing son. When Sondra announces she has decided against law school, the high-school-aged Theo is inspired to give up on his own higher education, seeking to claim his college tuition money in advance. He factors in the cost of lab fees as well, since if he had gone, he argues, he would have been a chemistry major. When Cliff turns his wrath on his son, Theo retreats — partially: “Well, can I at least borrow three dollars for some pizza?” In another episode, Theo rhapsodizes about the merits of the University of California at Berkeley, daydreaming about cruising through campus in a convertible. Cliff, grouchy as ever, wonders aloud if the city has introduced a new fleet of convertible buses.
With a good deal of the series devoted to frustrations of the lesser and greater kind, The Cosby Show is less idealized than merely peaceable. Still, in many ways it is a throwback; it does not reflect much on its medium, nor does it seek to complicate the sitcom’s essential simplicity.
The sitcom, coming of age in the conformist 1950s, was devoted to presenting a whitewashed American family, stripped of conflict except of the most trifling variety. The Cosby Show, with its familiar living-room and kitchen sets, its nuclear family model, and its ever-present laugh track, is hardly ready to jettison all that came before it. And yet, by the very fact of its presence, it sought to widen the narrow funnel of the American ideal in order to include the Huxtables as well.
The Cosby Show made the unfamiliar familiar — and vice versa. A show about a wealthy African American couple and their ideal brood was hardly the stuff of Good Times or The Jeffersons. Would a mainstream American audience embrace the Huxtables? Cosby’s sweaters, impossibly ugly and yet deeply familiar, in a bad-Christmas-present sort of way, are the secret weapons. Cliff is black, bourgeois, a New Yorker, and a doctor, but he is also someone ordinary enough to have no fashion sense whatsoever. The sweaters domesticated him.
Cliff has his stubbornly undomesticated side as well. He is Groucho Marx as father, his whole family serving as his straight man and their escapades providing the ideal opportunity for Cosby to riff. Cliff is the responsible id. He dreams of hoagies, hides potato chips in the chimney, and regales Theo’s friends with adolescent stories of skating across his kitchen floor. He is crafty, petulant, and often cutting in his sneak attacks on his wife and children. And yet Cliff is not an eternal man-child, like those who would follow in his wake; Brooklyn’s answer to The King of Queens he could never be. The burdens of race, as well as the character’s own medical persona, demand a fundamental devotion to family and profession that offsets such surface attributes.
The series itself walked the same line between playfulness and respectability. In a magnificently executed episode from second season, “Theo’s Holiday,” that echoes many of the themes of the pilot, Theo informs his parents that he plans to make a living as a model. (Perhaps Theo and the George Costanza of the booming hand-modeling sideline in Seinfeld’s “The Puffy Shirt” could go into business together.) Intent on teaching him another lesson about economics, the family transforms their home into the Real World Apartments, with his parents and sisters playing the new people in his life: the landlord, the modeling agency secretary, the café owner, the bank loan officer. Theo’s room, now unfurnished, goes for $600 a month. Does he want a bed? That’ll be $200 extra. Denise, as the restaurant proprietor, charges him $24.50 for sneaking a snack out of the fridge. Diminutive Rudy, glasses perched on her nose, looks over his loan documents at the bank, and Cliff, a cigar stub clamped firmly between his teeth, is the ever-skeptical landlord. By show’s end, Theo has learned his lesson: “I learned that when I go into the real world, I don’t want to do business with anyone in my family.”
The entirety of The Cosby Show is like the Real World Apartments, offering neatly packaged life lessons in the guise of witty games and practical jokes. When an elderly neighbor is in need of a health tutorial, Cliff fakes collapsing after consuming a gigantic hoagie. And when Vanessa is caught drinking with friends, the family plays a mock drinking game together to teach her a lesson. Cliff, his mouth crumpled sidelong into a parody of an afternoon drinker, shouts out encouragement: “Drink ’er down! Chug-a-lug!”
The series’ carefully tuned balance — between the aspirational and the relatable, the responsible and the ridiculous — helped make the series into not only one of the most popular shows on television during its nine-year run on NBC, but one of the most beloved television programs of all time.
In its first season, The Cosby Show was the highest-rated new sitcom since Mork & Mindy. It would go on to become the first show since All in the Family to top the Nielsen ratings for four straight seasons; it spent seven seasons in the top five and reached an average audience share greater than 50 (meaning that more than 50 percent of all viewers watching TV on Thursdays at 8 pm were watching The Cosby Show) in both 1985–86 and 1986–87. Cosby was the highest-rated show on television since Bonanza more than twenty years prior, in 1964–65. It was the highest-rated series of the 1980s, and no show since has achieved remotely comparable ratings. (For comparison’s sake, the top-rated show of 2011–12, NBC’s Sunday Night Football, achieved an audience share of 20 among viewers ages 18–49, less than half of Cosby’s at its peak.)
Premiering on television two months before Ronald Reagan — who had first announced his presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 — was reelected in a landslide, The Cosby Show was simultaneously about and above race. The series resides in its own handcrafted, effortlessly multicultural world, where veterinarians and naval officers are black, neighbors are white, and patients are Asian American, and yet discussion of the Huxtables’ personal good fortune as successful African American professionals is drastically limited. Much is made of the Huxtables’ wealth (“Let me get something straight, OK,” Cliff tells Vanessa. “Your mother and I are rich. You have nothing.”), but the show wears its blackness lightly, like a self-evident fact hardly worth explicit mention. Politics only sneaks in at the margins. Sondra and her husband name their twins Winnie and Nelson, but it is up to us to presume that their namesakes might be Winnie and Nelson Mandela. “Racism is not funny to me,” noted Cosby about his show’s purposeful avoidance of racial issues.
The Cosby Show prefers to be a filter, not a megaphone. When it does address race, it does so in sidelong fashion, letting others say what it preferred not to. In one of the most quietly indelible moments of Cosby’s run, an otherwise typical episode, “Vanessa’s Bad Grade” (Vanessa gets a D in school; Cliff falls asleep at a foreign film), transforms unexpectedly when the family shuffles into the living room, one by one, their mundane business interrupted by the sound of Dr. Martin Luther King spilling out from the television: “Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!” For two minutes — a relative eternity in television time — we watch the family watching Dr. King. No one says a word, and when King’s “I Have a Dream” speech ends (“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”), so does the show. That “Vanessa’s Bad Grade” debuted on January 16, 1986, four days before Martin Luther King Day officially became a national holiday, was a subtext that viewers would have to provide themselves.
Eliding race as it does, The Cosby Show is more explicitly concerned with reeducating savage men in their responsibilities toward women. The series designates two official whipping boys, present mostly to be lectured to: Sondra’s husband, Elvin (Geoffrey Owens), and Rudy’s pipsqueak friend Kenny, a.k.a. “Buuud” (Deon Richmond). Elvin asks Claire whether she has checked with her husband before purchasing an expensive painting, and solemnly informs Sondra that she should not pump her own gas, since “women should not smell like gasoline. Women should smell like sandwiches.” Kenny solemnly echoes the pronouncements of his unseen older brother on women’s proper roles, only to be repeatedly put in his place by Claire, and even by Rudy. Race is too inflammatory to dwell on, but The Cosby Show solemnly lectures its audience on feminism through its designated straw men. One set of reactionary boors stands in for another.
More than just a war of attrition between parents and children or feminists and traditionalists, The Cosby Show is also a lovingly drawn portrait of a devoted marriage. Claire and Cliff may bicker (whenever Claire, in full attorney mode, begins a sentence with “Let the record show,” Cliff instinctively flinches), but when Cliff leads Claire in a 2 a.m. dance in their living room or enlists the kids in putting together a mock high school prom for their parents, The Cosby Show offers a snapshot of a life devoid of that sitcom staple: petty bickering. Claire is tough on her husband at times, but she always laughs at his jokes. What more is there to a marriage?
There are hints of darker sentiments, problems too complex to be solved within twenty-two minutes. The specter of drug abuse is introduced, and summarily dispatched with a flick of the parental whip: “As long as you are living in this house, you are not to do any drugs. When you move into your own house, you are not to do any drugs. When I am dead, and you are seventy-five, you are not to do any drugs.” Contrast Cosby’s approach to that of its contemporary Roseanne in its drug-themed episode “A Stash from the Past,” in which Roseanne and Dan accuse their kids of doing drugs, only to then get high on what turns out to be their own supply (more about that episode in the following chapter).
Slower and more easygoing by a good measure than tightly paced successors like Seinfeld, The Cosby Show is more than willing to turn over three or four of its weekly twenty-two minutes to a musical number or comic bit, with Cosby serving as the impresario and master of ceremonies. The performances are often integrated into the show by the cast’s presence, be it the family lip-synching to a James Brown number or attending a Lena Horne show for Cliff’s birthday. Though hesitant to address the politics of race too explicitly or too often, The Cosby Show nonetheless gave Cosby a chance to school audiences in the glories of African American culture.
Lena Horne was far from the only legendary performer to make a personal appearance on the show. Every few episodes, sitcom devotion to plot hijinks gives way to a guest singer or performer: Tito Puente, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Art Blakey, Placido Domingo, B. B. King. Comedians and clowns such as Bill Irwin and Danny Kaye are brought on to perform their own routines. (You have not truly lived until you’ve seen noted college basketball guru Dick Vitale as a gabby moving man in the episode “The Getaway.”) The Cosby Show owes something to vaudeville in its embrace of variety and its leisurely sense of pacing. Kaye takes over the overwhelming bulk of “The Dentist,” the episode he guest-stars in, as a mischievous tooth-puller with a pair of talking dentures. “Do I know you?” he asks them. “No, but you’ve taken out some of our friends.” Cliff, the eternal child, asks on the way out, sotto voce, if he can see the teeth once more.
Cosby, meanwhile, was forever the educator, and he took his responsibilities seriously. He had, after all, played a teacher on The Bill Cosby Show, and, billed as “Dr. William H. Cosby, Ed.D.” in his role as The Cosby Show’s cocreator, made no secret of his doctorate in education. The latter series served as a convenient mechanism for teaching his millions of regular viewers about jazz or the blues or the March on Washington. History became a personal affair; the March, in the episode of the same name, wasn’t just about Dr. Martin Luther King but also about Cliff’s singing that day on the bus, and his father Russell’s recitation of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. When Russell sings “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” we understand: History is what happens to people just like the Huxtables — or us.
Later seasons found the show seeking to revitalize itself with new characters: Denise’s navy-man husband (Joseph C. Phillips), her too-cute-by-half stepdaughter Olivia (Raven-Symoné), and Claire’s inner-city cousin Pam (Erika Alexander), who pops up whenever the writers remember she exists. (Also look out for Seth Gilliam — The Wire’s Sgt. Carver — as one of Pam’s friends.) It also leaned on increasingly implausible reasons — housing shortages on naval bases, Denise’s and Theo’s seeming inability to complete and return housing forms promptly — to keep all the children at home. (Why couldn’t everyone just visit regularly?) Even Sondra’s husband Elvin is overhauled, transformed from Neanderthal chauvinist to the kind of man who carries his baby strapped to his chest. None of the new performers are entirely successful; the original chemistry Cosby created with his on-screen children could not be replicated. Luckily, Malcolm-Jamal Warner kept the faith until the very end, with his Theo also subtly altered over the course of the show’s run from teenage slacker into a youth mentor and high-achieving college student.
The Cosby Show’s incredible success also led to a college-themed spinoff, A Different World (NBC, 1987–1993), in which Lisa Bonet’s Denise is sent off to her parents’ alma mater, Hillman College. A Different World had its own surprisingly successful run, given Bonet’s limited acting and the show’s sharply politicized content, seemingly all women’s studies courses and gender-integrated beauty contests. (The show had the good sense to rapidly jettison Bonet in favor of sharper performers like Kadeem Hardison’s flip-up-sunglasses-rocking Dwayne Wayne and Jasmine Guy’s Southern belle Whitley.) But in a wider sense, The Cosby Show would have few if any successors.
The mid-1980s — that era of Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen — would spell the last hurrah of the crossover hit. The Cosby Show deliberately appealed to white and African American audiences alike, but with the advent of new networks such as Fox and UPN, future African American sitcoms would be relegated to niche broadcasting.
How many white families would gather weekly around the television to watch Martin (Fox, 1992–97)? And how many black families would be sure never to miss an episode of Seinfeld? The Cosby Show existed in an effortlessly multicultural realm, but how much of an African American presence would there be on an NBC hit of the next decade, such as Friends? There would be other worthy shows with majority African American casts — the underrated Martin, for one, along with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC, 1990–96) and The Bernie Mac Show (Fox, 2001–06) — but the miracle of Cosby was never to be duplicated. Television, in the aftermath of The Cosby Show, would find it easier, and in some ways preferable, to cater to audiences that were homogeneous — not only racially but also culturally and demographically.
On April 30, 1992, The Cosby Show aired its two-part finale. While Theo was graduating from college, other young African American men were rioting in the streets of Los Angeles, irate at the seeming indignity of the Rodney King verdict, announced the previous day. Mayor Tom Bradley pleaded with Angelenos to go back home and watch The Cosby Show instead. (Cosby himself would appear on NBC’s L.A. affiliate after the finale, begging rioters to demonstrate calm.) In the less violently fractured and racially polarized alternate world of the Huxtables, Cliff is amazed to find himself sitting in the stands as Theo graduates. Falling into reverie, he looks back at the very beginning of The Cosby Show’s story, doling out Monopoly money and explaining the facts of the real world once more to his immature son. Cliff, emerging from his daydream, looks at his wife, mouth agape: “What just happened?”
What had happened was the phenomenon of The Cosby Show, savior of NBC’s flagging fortunes, recipient of an unprecedented $500 million syndication deal, and one of the top five shows on television for seven of its eight seasons. Cliff and Claire return home from graduation and dance one last time around their living room. Then, Huxtables no longer, Cosby and Rashad head off beyond the borders of the television screen and into the studio audience. Their fellow cast members stand and applaud them, and by extension themselves. The Cosby Show took a final victory lap, and for at least this once in sitcom history, the victory is not marred by the celebration. In fact, this acknowledgment of all of us, at home, watching the Huxtables live their lives is perfect in its own way. Cliff and Claire waltz out the door of the studio, never to return. All that remains are these 201 episodes, documents of a certain kind of situation comedy perfection. The traditional sitcom — Mom, Dad, irrepressible kids — had been mastered, soon to be permanently retired in favor of sportier, jauntier models.
Excerpted from Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from ‘I Love Lucy’ to ‘Community,’ published by Chicago Review Press. Copyright © 2014 by Saul Austerlitz
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