NBC’s hit sitcom The Cosby Show (1984-92), starring Bill Cosby as Brooklyn obstetrician and family man Cliff Huxtable, has returned to television and thus to the nation’s consciousness. The cable channels TBS, WGN, and Nick at Nite air Cosby reruns; NBC broadcast a two-hour Cosby retrospective during last month’s sweeps period. For whatever reason—the Eighties revival, a need for comfort and stability after 9/11, the shocking discovery that black people once appeared on an NBC sitcom—viewers have presumably started enjoying the Huxtable family’s antics again. Not that I object, considering the show was and is better than most other sitcoms shot on videotape before a live studio audience. Better Cosby than detritus like Mama’s Family for half an hour of humorous mainstream televisual escapism.
Cosby does have its faults: Cliff’s smugness, his epileptogenic sweaters (and the garish Eighties fashions in general), the lite synth-jazz soundtrack, those excruciating segments where the family lip-syncs to 1960s hits. More important, however, are the faults indicative of the Reagan era’s retrograde sociopolitical mindset:
—The show depicts most women, especially Cliff’s wife Clair, as icy, irrational shrews whom he and the show’s other warm, rational, easygoing men humor in a somewhat patronizing manner. The antifeminist backlash back then in government, entertainment, and the news media disparaged aggressive, nonsubmissive women (such as Clair the attorney) and trumpeted America’s alleged return to good old-fashioned patriarchal family values.
—The show never depicts or even mentions intimate interracial relationships, curious considering the show’s racially-diverse locale, New York City; the exclusive white social circles the upper-middle-class Huxtables probably would have encountered; and how light-skinned the eldest Huxtable children, Sondra and Denise, were when compared to their three siblings and to Cliff and Clair. Of course, Reagan’s “Morning in America” meant light vanquished dark, so to speak, and which show would dare disrespect such a popular president by promoting miscegenation (except maybe during a Very Special Episode where the mixed-race pairing ends badly)? On the other hand, no TV series can show everything about life, and why can’t black sitcoms eschew controversial issues the way white sitcoms do* and appeal to wide (i.e., mostly white) audiences, maybe even spread racial goodwill via heartwarming wisecracks?
The Cosby Show reflected its times, intentionally or not.** Nostalgia erases the sometimes questionable context of a cultural product, an obvious truism one should know since the Eighties nostalgia boom might help George W. Bush, another bellicose, intellectually incurious, right-wing Republican in the White House.
*During the late Eighties, in an effort to keep its ratings healthy, Cosby started covering provocative topics such as learning disabilities and menstruation. The show also introduced a teenage cousin named Pam (with a troubled background) who declined to lose her hymen to her boyfriend, in that honest, outspoken, pro-virginity episode every family sitcom runs.
**Ironically (well, maybe not), Ronald Reagan’s favorite TV show was not Cosby but another NBC sitcom, the uberwhite Family Ties.
June 24, 2002 (slightly revised June 2, 2023)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 