The Cosby Show

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Robin Markowitz

The Cosby Show, a situation comedy that ran for eight seasons on NBC Television, was one of the most intensely and immediately popular shows ever broadcast in America. The show, which began in the fall of 1984, featured comedian Bill Cosby in the role of obstetrician-father Cliff Huxtable and his family: attorney-wife Claire, daughters Sondra (18), Denise (15), Vanessa (11), Rudy (5), and son Theo (13). According to the December 5, 1985 issue of USA Today, the program premiered at the number one spot on the Nielson ratings, reached that spot ten times during the first season, and was number one in every age group. An estimated 62 million people tuned in every Thursday night during the early years of the show's run. More significantly, The Cosby Show was the first American television show to feature the daily adventures of a prosperous, intact upper-middle class family of African descent.

The source of the show's popularity and significance in television history stemmed not from Bill Cosby's own intentional presentation of the ideology of African-American upward mobility and the restoration of traditional family values to popular culture, but in the sheer pleasure of the nearly plotless structure of the show. On The Cosby Show, the focus on the seemingly "insignificant" bits of business of everyday life became the show's main attraction. It was truly the first "show about nothing" that Seinfeld later claimed to be. The first several episodes were drawn almost without alteration from Cosby's early 1980s stand-up routines and it is primarily from his comic vision that the show emerged whole. The show created a safe, crisis-free world that viewers had a chance to enter for a half-hour every week. Regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or age, many viewers immediately recognized themselves in the show: the Huxtable characters enacted the strikingly real ordinary domestic activities of the viewing audience. In its mid-1980s heyday, Thursday night became "Cosby night," a time anticipated with relish.

Only one family comedy before The Cosby Show came close to this structural breakthrough. The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1951-1966) portrayed a "real" family who "played themselves," as it were. These shows were relaxed in the extreme and the Nelsons themselves seemed to exist in a state of grace; Ozzie, the "head of the household," never seemed to have an occupation and simply sauntered around the house all day. He lived the domestic life of a retired man with a servant (Harriet). There was, more importantly, some slight shift of focus to the everyday "doings" of life rather than on a very tight plotline. We see here only a glimmer of what The Cosby Show would bring to fruition and Seinfeld would later be so widely noted for.

One early episode of The Cosby Show, which concerned Cliff's looking after a slumber party of five-year-olds, disposed of some five to ten minutes of Cliff playing "bucking bronco" with the children: that is, bouncing some ten of them, one at a time, upon his knee. Someone connected with the show told T.V. Guide in 1985 that it was "one long Jello commercial." The episode was perhaps the most loosely scripted sitcom episode ever produced: the audience simply delighted in watching Bill Cosby make real children laugh. At this point, it was clear that the show's meandering tone was no mistake, no bug that needed to be worked out (as one might have originally suspected), but in fact, the very secret of show's success. Watching The Cosby Show, it appeared as though the cameras were simply stuck in a window, left on, and the finished product assembled at random. Viewers of the show luxuriated in a sort of celebration of banal, ordinary existence and thus participated in a validation of their own, often-overlooked daily life.

The most fascinating aspect of this is that the show's creators seemed utterly unaware of the reasons why people were glued to their show. Bill Cosby, for his part, told Larry King in 1989 that the show was successful because now the parents always get to "win." He reported his distress at programs such as Silver Spoons that depicted weak, incompetent parents led around by clever children. Cosby saw himself as the avenging parental Rambo of domestic comedy. The world the show created stands however, quite apart from (and indeed, opposed to) the ideological message Cosby sought to deliver.

What distinguished the Cosby show from virtually all others in the family comedy genre was the almost total absence of struggle or conflict. There is a sense that some measure of real suffering and discord occurred in the past, in previous generations, but not anymore. The grandparents' function in the show is to give some hint of this, as is the display of various icons scattered about the Huxtable home. A picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. reposed on the wall of eldest daughter Sondra's room and in another episode all of the trivial action stopped dead in its tracks when King's 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech appeared unexpectedly on the living room TV screen. It was as if the savior himself had appeared in an apparition. The message was clear: without that struggle, the Huxtables idyllic existence would not be. Now, of course, all struggle is ended. If ever there were an ideal representation of Reagan-era complacency, this was it.