'The Cosby Show' at 40: Groundbreaking show now has bittersweet legacy

Ever since she was 4, Ruth Miller has loved "The Cosby Show," and to a large degree, lived "The Cosby Show," too. The Wheatley Heights native is 44 now, which means — you can do the math — "Cosby" has been a part of her life from its very first day, starting Sept. 20, 1984.

The show, which turns " 40 on Friday, is part of her, and she is part of the show in some hard to explain way, she explains. The rhythms, characters, beats and stories have been internalized so much and for so long that she can't quite remember a time when they weren't. Miller doesn't watch much anymore — not many other fans do after episodes were stripped from the air in the wake of allegations that the show's namesake, Bill Cosby, had sexually assaulted dozens of women for decades.

But no matter. She almost doesn't have to.

"I remember it as the only thing my father, who was a pastor, looked forward to watching with us together as a family each week. No cursing, always a positive image, and it got deeper with certain things regarding Black family life than anything else on TV. The Huxtables were like the extended family you wanted to grow up with and you could not tell me when I was little that they were not my [real] family."

TWO BIG ANNIVERSARIES

How, then, does someone like the truest and bluest of fans — someone like Miller — make sense of all that has happened since? Or to turn the question around, how does anyone begin to make sense of an anniversary like this, or two of them, in fact?

Forty years ago, one of TV's most beloved series saved a struggling network and reordered the racial dynamics of prime time — and to an extent the culture at large — forever.

 And 10 years ago next month, a comic in Cosby's hometown of Philadelphia outed the eponymous star as "Bill Cosby, rapist" during a stand-up show. Since then, Cosby, 87, has been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by more than 60 women — he's denied all allegations — then spent nearly three years at a state prison near Philadelphia before he was released in 2021 after a higher court ruled as inadmissible statements Cosby had made in an earlier trial relating to one of those assaults.

But dozens of women's accusations stand, which brings us all sharply back to that question of how?

If we do bother to give this much thought, Cosby's public humiliation — or more precisely his accusers' — is ours to some degree, too. We were the ones who celebrated him for over a half-century, who revered him, who called him "America's dad," and who grew up with "I Spy," "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," and spent every Thursday night at 8 p.m. with "The Cosby Show." Sept. 20, 1984 was really just the culmination of all that preceded — the sheer cultural weight of All Things Cosby, from the comedy albums of the '60s to Jell-O pudding ads of the '70s — which turbocharged that momentous launch and makes this 40th anniversary feel even more consequential.

HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF IT?

Many have tried, only to throw up their hands in a figurative gesture of futility. By the end of his four-part film in 2022, "We Need to Talk About Cosby," the comic and cultural critic W. Kamau Bell asked, "What happens when the artist you idolize isn't the human being you thought they were, and what if their artistic achievement, living example and good works were so great that they changed the world? What then? That's the Bill Cosby question."

But that's "The Cosby Show" question, too. Cosby is inextricable from "Cosby," just as Jerry Seinfeld is from "Seinfeld" or Mary Tyler Moore is from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." The show is the person, or at least his personification to some degree. What then?

'THERE'S NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER'

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, an author (of 2020's "Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century") and professor (at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California) says "it's a hard question and one of the reasons I loved being part of Kamau's special because he himself is very clear that there's no one right answer here. He did end up by saying we need to acknowledge both aspects of the show and its creator. My own feeling is that this was an even greater betrayal by someone who opened all these doors and who created space for people who didn't have space before — and yet who made all these [victims] feel so small and who were treated so horrendously."

To explore the true meaning of this 40th anniversary, you must begin with the show itself, and that's not so easy. "The Cosby Show" has been so thoroughly expunged from the TV landscape that it's now impossible to find an episode anywhere on free TV, or on that endless free streaming buffet table either. You can pay for episodes (Prime Video, Philo) or explore the distant outer reaches of cable for channels that still air repeats (TV One, The Grio). Otherwise, nothing.

The irony is that not all that long after the final "farewell" on April 30, 1992, "Cosby" reruns were so prevalent on New York TV that to casually flip around channels was to time-travel through different seasons and different iconic moments: Clair gets the "birthday blues" (the white cake!), or Sondra in labor or Theo's earring or the family lip-syncing Ray Charles' "Nighttime is the Right Time." That all ended shortly after a grainy iPhone recording of comedian Hannibal Buress went viral. "Google 'Bill Cosby rapist,' " he told the audience during a stand-up routine. "It gets more hits than 'Hannibal Buress.' "

Fans Googled, and found that a woman named Andrea Constand had been paid millions in 2006 by Cosby to settle her own rape accusations (Constand got another trial in 2018, which led to Cosby's conviction). Other women had supported Constand with their own accounts of assault. Facts of the settlement had been part of the public record, but the TV industry had ignored them until the Buress video.

A few weeks after the Buress show, TV Land pulled repeats, followed by Nick at Nite, and then the rest of the dominoes fell — Aspire, BET's Centric, Bounce TV, Netflix and Hulu. NBC quietly killed a Cosby sitcom that was in development. Cosby disappeared from other places, too — the websites of some institutions, including the Television Academy Foundation, which stripped Cosby interviews from their video archives, as if to wipe the record clean, or dissociate themselves from his past.

The inconvenient problem is that "The Cosby Show" was the record of '80s TV, to a large degree, and to think of '90s TV, or the aughts, or TV right up to this day without "Cosby" somewhere in the discussion is impossible.

USHERING IN A GOLDEN ERA OF BLACK TV

"Cosby" revolutionized the prime time sitcom simply by restoring it to mass popularity. It shattered the prevailing (and conventional) network wisdom of the time that The Sitcom Is Dead, then unleashed waves of other comic-driven eponymous series, soon to become landmarks in their own right, from "Roseanne" to "Seinfeld" to "Bernie Mac" to "Ellen." 

From "Cosby" sprang a Black alt-universe on TV, too, mostly on Fox and UPN. The three major networks — to that point timorous if not downright craven regarding matters of diversity and representation — suddenly saw dollar signs.

The golden era of Black TV that followed "Cosby" had real-world impact, too. Historically Black colleges and universities — HBCUs — saw a surge in enrollment following the huge success of the "Cosby" spinoff "A Different World," whose fictional Hillman was based on Howard University.

Meanwhile, white Americans' perception of Black family life shifted, too. Shaped until then by '70s hits about working-class Blacks such as "Good Times" or "Sanford and Son," the Huxtables magically appeared in millions of living rooms while viewers, Black and white, saw a heightened and improved version of their own families. Cliff (an obstetrician) and Clair (a lawyer) embraced a rainbow of traditional family values, too — the importance of education, fidelity in marriage, the fealty of children to their parents. Cosby became America's dad while a so-called "Clair Huxtable Effect" led to a surge in working mothers.

While the show embraced African American culture, it was also sanitized of any discussion of race — key to its huge crossover appeal.

In a sharply critical essay that ran in The New York Times at the height of "Cosby"-mania in 1989, the influential Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that "as the dominant representation of Blacks on TV, ['Cosby'] suggests that Blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgment of the severely constricted life opportunities that most Black people face."

A University of Massachusetts Amherst survey corroborated this in a survey of white viewers after the show ended in 1992, with respondents saying that if Black people couldn't pull themselves out of poverty then that was their own fault, because the Huxtables had obviously succeeded. Gates' and others' concern was that "The Cosby Show" had made racism more invidious.

But any pushback of that was ignored because we were all living in Cosby's world, and if we had a TV set, there was no escaping it. NBC and Cosby himself made certain of that.

'THE COSBY SHOW' ALMOST DIDN'T HAPPEN

What's now forgotten is that this TV sitcom that changed the world almost never happened. By the early '80s, Cosby had a string of network sitcom failures but there was something to suggest this one would be different. Cosby had just released a popular comedy film, "Bill Cosby: Himself," which a pair of former ABC executives, Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, thought they could craft into a traditional sitcom.

The star pushed back. He wanted to play a limousine driver, his wife a Latina — with no kids. Cosby's wife, Camille, insisted on an upscale family comedy, with distant echoes of their own. She prevailed, and what the network ultimately got lasted eight seasons. Living in a perfect Brooklyn brownstone, there was the father, who was a respected obstetrician-gynecologist, his wife, a successful attorney, and their five kids, Sondra (Sabrina LeBeauf), Denise (Lisa Bonet, who went on to "A Different World"), youngest daughters Rudy (Keisha Knight Pulliam), Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe), and oldest and only son, Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner).

The show was an immediate hit and spent the next five seasons as prime time's undisputed champion, averaging just over 40 million viewers by the fifth season.

SO WHAT IS THE SHOW'S LEGACY?

All these years later, a fan like Ruth Miller isn't about to give Cosby a pass — but she is willing to give one to his show. "No, of course it's not OK what happened to those women — no one is debating that," she says. "I feel like a lot of the time we have to realize that people are flawed but also capable of beautiful things, and should one cancel the other out? Looking back at all the doors it opened for Blacks and for Black TV, you wouldn't have had all those shows if 'The Cosby Show' hadn't opened them."

Morgan, the author and scholar of Black TV, has a more sobering outlook about legacy.

She says that when she mentions Cosby in her classes the first response from her students is " 'oh, he's the rapist ...' Because of what he did to those women, they are not watching his shows. You can imagine a parallel universe where [what Cosby has been accused of doing] did not happen, and I think Gen Z viewers would have been drawn to the show, because it still feels very timely and relevant. But now, the first thing they bring up are the crimes. So for them, this question of legacy is a non-starter."

By the time the 50th anniversary rolls around, few of a certain age may even remember "The Cosby Show" or bother to, Morgan says. By then, she wonders, will the legacy simply be "dead"?