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University Daily Kansan / Wednesday, April 29, 1992
Farewell to the Huxtables
'The Cosby Show' ends with unprecedented television success
The Associated Press
NEW WORK — The Huxtables, one of America's favorite families, are leaving their familiar Brooklyn brownstone—and prime time—after eight spectacular seasons.
When "The Cosby Show" broadcasts its final original episode tomorrow, a special one-hour installment, it will have been watched by more people than any other situation comedy in the history of television.
Why was it so successful?
It would be nice to say that Bill Cosby's charming comedy persona virtually guaranteed a hit, but it would be too, too.
Cosby was a top comedian in nightclubs and on record albums in 1965 when producer Sheldon Leonard hired him to co-star with Robert Culp in "I Spy," an action-adventure series.
As the first African-American man to star in a noncomedy TV series, Cosby brought immense charm to the role of a clever, tough Rhodes scholar and spy who, like the actor, was a Philadelphia and a graduate of Temple University.
But his ensuing prime-time efforts, "The Bill Cosby Show," a sitcom, and two variety shows, "The New Bill Cosby Show" and "Cos," were flops. Only his Saturday morning animated comedy, "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," was a hit.
The show's success also cannot be pegged to its executive producers, the hitmakers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner. The Carsey-Werner Co., in 1988, had three of the four shows in television, No. 1 "The Cosby Show," No. 2 "Roseanne," and "A Different World," the 4. spinoff of "The Cosby Show."
But Carsey-Werner's first sitcom, "Oh Madeline," flopped in 1983. Its hit string was followed by "Chicken Soup" in 1989 and "Grand," both failures. If it wasn't Cosby's star power and it wasn't Carsey-Werner, then what was it?
The show's elegance, maybe. TV Guide caught a piece of it in its first-season review: "the kind of humor that grows out of a situation, rather than relying on the usual sitcom formula of zingers and one-liners."
The show's creators, Ed Weinberger, Michael Leeson and William H. Cosby Jr., created a show that was tidy written, with warm, genuine characters and a comfy relevance that was never too threatening.
As Heatcliff "Cliff" Huxitable, Cosby portrayed an eyedobician who practiced from a home office. He was a professional man, a healer and life-giver. He also, perhaps most importantly, was a father.
Huxtable's wife, Clair (Phylicia Rashad), was a lawyer, a strong woman, a woman with grace.
diligently good parents to their five children. They listened, they reflected. They seemed to have an endless supply of time, but they put it to good use.
Both Cliff and Clair were relentlessly,
In one show, when they found a marijuanacigarette in their son's schoolbook, it actually was not his. He said so; they believed him.
"You're a lot of things." Huxtable-Cosby told his son, Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner), "some good, some bad. But you're not a liar."
That the Huxuables were affluent, middle-class African-Americans was secondary to "The Cosby Show." Their being African-American and their pride in it was embedded in the show without being its engine.
When the Huxtables celebrated the 49th wedding anniversary of Cliff's parents, the biggest crisis was the older couple's refusal to take a world cruise.
The high point of that show came in the middle when, en famille, the family lip-synced a chorus-line version of Ray Charles's "The Night Time Is the Right Time."
The bit was funny and sweet, and just to make sure you got enough of it, it was repeated, in its entirety, behind the final credits.
The Huxtables were a happy family. If they never encountered racism and discrimination, well, maybe it was because they never tried to join the country club.
Bill Cosby
Perhaps what made "The Cosby Show" so successful is stated explicitly in its title.
Who's the star? Cosby. Who co-created it? Cosby. Who's the "executive consultant"? Cosby. Who, with Carsey-Werner, is the series' co-producer? Cosby. Who co-wrote the show's theme music?
Study finds TV comedy may have desensitized whites to minority issues
You get the picture.
The Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — By featuring a wealthy African-American family, "The Cosby Show" may have desensitized whites to the problems of many other African-Americans, according to study financed by the actor Bill Cosby himself.
The comedy aims to avoid African-American stereotypes by depicting a wealthy African-American family. But it actually desensitizes whites to racial inequalities because it shows African-Americans enjoying the same opportunities as whites, the study says.
"If black people fail, then white people can look at the successful black people on 'The Cosby Show' and say they only have themselves to blame," said SJ打ally, a communications professor at the University of Massachusetts.
Jnally and colleague Justin Lewis have written a 200-page study on the social effects of the NBC show. The study is to be published in a month.
The show, seen by more viewers than any sitcom in U.S. television history, will broadcast its final
episode tomorrow.
The researchers said Friday that they picked the show, which began in 1984, because it was the first all-African-American program to avoid racial stereotyping.
When they began, the two professors at the Amherst campus wrote to Cosby, who has a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. He responded with a $16,500 grant.
The professors interviewed about 200 people of varying economic and racial status in the Springfield area. They watched the show in their homes and answered questions about their impressions.
The professors said that nearly all the whites they interviewed thought affirmative action was no longer needed.
The professors called that attitude enlightened racism.
"Most white people accepted that America has had a kind of racist past, but the presence of the Huxtables and their spinoffs really seems to send a message to white people that black people can make it if they try," Lewis said.
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