Bill Cosby is a rapist. Gonna say that up front. He did terrible things to women, hasn’t really shown any remorse for it, and, despite that, he spent most of his life pretending to be the moral center of American comedy (even after admitting to cheating on his wife). As Hannibal Buress put it “It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the f*cking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. ‘Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. ‘I don’t curse on stage.’ Well, yeah, you’re a rapist, so, I’ll take you sayin’ lots of motherf*ckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren’t a rapist.” He may never be convicted, and I suppose there is a small chance that I am wrong, and that all these women have been falsely accusing him since the 1970s with similar stories that happen to match some partial admissions by him. But, I’m willing to bet otherwise.
It’s difficult to separate the artist from the art. That makes writing this episode’s review more challenging, since I put it on the list before the accusations really came to light, but am writing it after his first trial (update: And publishing it before his second). But, ultimately, I’m going to keep it on here. The fact that Polanski is a pedophile doesn’t mean Chinatown isn’t brilliant, that Orson Scott Card has weird conspiracy theories about the “gay agenda” doesn’t mean that Ender’s Game isn’t a good book, or that [insert almost every poet from 1700-1980 here] being an anti-Semite doesn’t mean that their poetry isn’t good. You don’t have to support them, you don’t have to give money to them, but it’s also true that not everything that a bad person does is inherently bad, or even that a person who does a bad thing is a completely bad person (note: Cosby is a bad person, he’s an unrepentant rapist). In the end, trying to write off everything someone does as bad because they did something else horrible is just avoiding thinking about a complicated issue, and that benefits no one. So, with all that said, the rest of this review will be focused on this episode.
While finales are common on this list, so too are pilots, and second episodes. Why second? Because that’s often the first real episode of the show, because the pilot is often CosbyCastfilmed without fully forming the characters and the style of the series (in the case of The Cosby Show, they changed the style and even the number of children). Additionally, because most writers want to hook you early, they usually put the best script for the season into production first after the pilot is picked up. This is the second episode of this particular show, and it definitely was when they first managed to find the voice they wanted for the show. The idea behind the show was to show a positive, upper-middle-class portrayal of an African-American family. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable (Rapist) was a doctor and his wife Clair (Phylicia Rashad) was a successful attorney. They had five children: Sondra (Sabrina Le Beauf), who was in college in this episode; wild child Denise (Lisa Bonet); Middle-child and only son Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner); Nosy pre-teen Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe); and unbelievably cute youngest child Rudy (Keshia Knight “Googling me after watching me as a five-year-old will make you uncomfortable” Pulliam).
cosbyface.jpgThe show’s humor was based on Bill Cosby’s stand-up routines, which mostly focused on his own family life, and incorporated his trademark over-the-top facial reactions (which were often so elaborate that Jim Carrey studied them for the part of his career where he was funny). This episode focuses on two of the more complicated issues in parenting: Explaining death to your child, and dealing with the fact that your children can be jerks.
