Once that happened, I knew this nostalgic experiment was over. My wife had to have a very difficult conversation with our daughter as she stared at a tabloid headline in the supermarket checkout aisle. My son’s too young to understand any of this, and still occasionally asks to watch the slumber party episode again, but we’ll have to talk with him about it eventually.
So what’s it doing in this book, and ranked this highly? If you can somehow, even for only a moment, consider it independently from the real man at its center, you can still see that The Cosby Show was a masterpiece of the form: a simple, smart, elegant, and (especially in the early years, before the kids started to age past their respective plot utilities) hilarious family comedy. Cosby’s interplay with Phylicia Rashad as Clair, Malcolm-Jamal Warner as Theo (whose growth from impulsive kid to thoughtful young adult gave the series its narrative spine even as other actors and producers came and went), Keshia Knight Pulliam as Rudy, and all the rest of his fictional family was inspired, and the series continually found novel ways to turn its sermons into sitcom plots.
Season 2’s “Theo’s Holiday” is a wonder in this regard, as Cliff and Clair teach Theo about the specific responsibilities and financial costs that come with being an adult by turning the whole Huxtable brownstone into a role-playing exercise, with Cliff as the gruff landlord, Clair as a fast-talking saleswoman with a lilting Caribbean accent, and little Rudy as a bank president not inclined to give would-be male model Theo a loan. It’s fun to watch the whole cast try on these other roles, even as the episode’s slipping in basic real-world knowledge, and also illustrating what a good job the Huxtables have done in raising Theo, such that he would go along with the stunt.
Cliff and Clair’s firm but benevolent parenting style weighed on their kids, who felt pressured to equal their parents’ achievements—an impossible ambition, considering that Mom and Dad came up during the civil rights era and had to fight much harder for everything they had. “Because of what you two have accomplished, the world expects a lot more from us than from other kids,” Theo tells his father in season 6’s “I’m ‘In’ with the ‘In’ Crowd.” “And that’s our fault?” Cliff says, exasperated. “Think about it,” Theo says. “You’re a doctor, Mom’s a lawyer, that’s a lot of pressure.” “Theo, we never said, ‘Become a doctor, become a lawyer.’ We say, ‘Go to school,’ we say, ‘Study,’ we say, ‘Become something,’” Cliff says. He means it, but Theo seems unconvinced, and considering the comfortable life he and his sisters have been given—a life that includes guest shots by entertainment and political heroes like Lena Horne, Roscoe Lee Browne, Rita Moreno, Pam Grier, Stevie Wonder, and NBA-star-turned-senator Bill Bradley—who could blame him? The show was criticized, by liberals of all colors, as being somehow “unrealistic” or unrepresentative of African American life in the 1980s, a time of resurgent racism and the unraveling of the social safety net. There were fears that by showcasing such wealth and success each week on one of TV’s most popular shows, Cosby and company were inadvertently devaluing the struggle for equality that was still going on, and contributing to the lie that discrimination was somehow “over.” These complaints were amplified by Cosby’s cranky, up-by-my-bootstraps remarks in interviews, sentiments that sometimes bled into the scripts of episodes. (In season 2’s “Halloween,” Cliff says of trick-or-treating, “Why don’t we just call it what it is: begging!”)
In the end, though, the show was more aspirational than fantastic, and entertaining enough to deflect any editorials that criticized it. It took an image of domestic life that network TV had long presented as “normal” for white Americans—a mutually supportive nuclear family with charming and basically happy kids, headed by loving, educated parents who owned their own handsomely furnished house—and put a black family at the center, without any indication that the sight was odd, or even worthy of comment. The Cosby Show, like Bill Cosby’s long career before the show’s debut, was a testament to artistry and willpower, forces that fused to shatter every barrier placed in front of Cosby and other black entertainers throughout the twentieth century. Cosby was the first African American stand-up performer to cross over without doing any material related to race (his first performance on The Tonight Show was about karate); the first to create a recurring fictional universe of comic characters in his stand-up act (inner-city Philadelphia teens who appeared on multiple long-playing albums, and who later populated the hit cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids); the first black actor to simultaneously pitch products and services for major corporations, including Jell-O, Coke, and Kodak; the first black actor to get equal billing with a white lead on a hit network drama (I Spy, opposite Robert Culp—the forerunner of Miami Vice, the Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. movies, and other properties built around tough-sexy, salt-and-pepper teams); and the first to costar with another black lead actor in a series of hit action comedy films (opposite Sidney Poitier in 1974’s Uptown Saturday Night, 1975’s Let’s Do it Again, and 1977’s A Piece of the Action—without which the Bad Boys and Ride Along movies would be unthinkable).
Sadly, it is impossible revisit these milestones without imagining the horror happening behind the scenes of their creation. As this book went to press, Bill Cosby stood accused of drugging and raping more than fifty women in incidents spanning decades. The details are so sickening that it seems blasphemous to point out the cultural collateral damage caused by his crimes; but that damage is real, too, and germane to this book: More than fifty years’ worth of innovative popular culture has been soiled in the public imagination by a crime spree spanning half a century. It is now impossible to thrill to I Spy, imitate Fat Albert, swap lines from classic Cosby records like Sports, Revenge, or 200 M.P.H., or joke about Cliff Huxtable’s sweaters or the family’s dance moves in the show’s opening credits, without shuddering with revulsion. Cosby’s entire career has become a minefield of accidental reminders of the crimes he’s accused of committing. His album titles It’s True! It’s True!, For Adults Only, Bill Cosby Is Not Himself These Days, Inside the Mind of Bill Cosby, and Bill Cosby Talks to Kids About Drugs now seem like accidental confessions or sick jokes. Worse still is the season 7 Cosby Show episode “The Last Barbecue,” in which guests at a cookout become more amenable to sex when they sample Cliff’s special sauce. “Haven’t you ever noticed after people have some of my barbecue sauce, after a while, when it kicks in, they get all huggy-buggy?” he asks Clair, leering. “Haven’t you ever noticed that after one of my barbecues, and they have the sauce, people want to get right home?”
Everything that was once funny, sexy, or inspiring about Cosby is unsettling now. Every value he claimed to stand for has been revealed as a lie. Everything he said or did, achieved or touched, has an asterisk, including his most significant achievement, The Cosby Show. The series was credited with single-handedly reviving the family sitcom at a time when the TV business had just about given up on it, and with changing national attitudes about race with its depiction of an admirable, relatable, upper-middle-class black family. It did all these things and more. Its legacy shouldn’t be forgotten. It was a great show, but one that nobody will want to watch again for a very long time.
—AS (with MZS)
Moonlighting (ABC, 1985–1989) Total score: 87
Maddie Hayes: David, get serious.
David Addison: Get serious? Maddie, I just touched your rear end. If I get any more serious they’re gonna move us to cable!
How meta was Moonlighting? So meta that it didn’t just toy with the structure, tone, pace, and style of the detective drama every single week, it toyed with network business practices and audience patience as well. Created by Glenn Gordon Caron—previously a writer-producer on NBC’s Remington Steele, a show so similar to Moonlighting that Caron wrote Steele star Pierce Brosnan into a season 3 cameo—the scripts ran twice as long as the one-hour drama’s usual, because there was so much overlapping dialogue, delivered at machine-gun pace. The show’s commitment to Old Hollywood visuals (shot by s
eries cinematographer Gerald Finnerman, who photographed My Fair Lady) doubled each episode’s production time, and drove the budget up to almost a million dollars per hour. Sometimes fans had to wait weeks for a fresh installment; the delays became so commonplace that ABC recorded a promo showing executives waiting on the next episode. On a few occasions viewers tuned in to find that ABC had replaced a scheduled installment with a rerun because the producers had blown their deadline.
Despite this, Moonlighting was so original and beloved that both ABC and its viewers put up with all the mishegoss. It continued to be regarded with affection even in its last two seasons, when it seemed to be disintegrating onscreen. Cybill Shepherd revived her flagging acting career in the role of Maddie Hayes, owner of Los Angeles’s Blue Moon Detective Agency. A then-obscure character actor named Bruce Willis got cast as Maddie’s new partner, the horny, fast-talking smart aleck David Addison, when the only female ABC executive in the room during Moonlighting’s final round of casting told her male colleagues that Willis struck her as “one dangerous fuck.” Caron built the show around Shepherd and Willis’s palpable sexual chemistry (which was amplified by offscreen loathing) and had them bombard each other with sexual innuendo, the better to tease viewers who wanted the couple to act out one of David’s most memorable rhetorical questions: “Do bears bear? Do bees bee?”
The show’s many formal experiments included “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” a mostly black-and-white tribute to film noir introduced by Orson Welles, and airing just two days after Welles’s death; “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” an episode built around fantasy song-and-dance numbers; and “Atomic Shakespeare,” a Taming of the Shrew spoof with nonsensical dialogue in iambic pentameter. (“Yea, I say, but why do you bray? Do not gainsay what I say that we may make headway! I foray this way that I may be home ere midday.”)
And then… the phenomenon fell apart. In a classic case of “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Moonlighting’s postmortem reputation became a story about how the audience lost interest after David and Maddie slept together near the end of season 3—in an episode watched by more than sixty million people—thus proving why all ensuing TV comedies are wise to keep potential couples apart as long as possible.
It’s a great story. Too bad it’s not true. Here’s what actually happened:
Though the characters had sex again in the next episode, the show returned for season 4 with Maddie deciding to run away from David.
Shepherd was pregnant, Willis was filming the first Die Hard, and the costars hadn’t gotten along for quite some time, so it became easier for the show to keep the characters completely separate for the next eight episodes.
As Maddie traveled by train back to Los Angeles, she met and impulsively married a nice nebbish named Walter Bishop (Dennis Dugan), which added yet another obstacle to the central characters’ getting together in the long term, and one that made both of them look bad in the process.
Caron’s perfectionism had become especially problematic by this point. The delays were so bad that a month passed between the fourth-season premiere and the next episode.
David and Maddie never actually became a couple after that, other than a meta scene in the series finale where they decide to get married before their show is canceled.
So you had a show where the characters got together and almost immediately split, didn’t actually appear together on-camera for months after that, erected additional barriers that made the separation even more uncomfortable, and had abnormally long gaps between episodes. The audience didn’t flee because they got bored after David and Maddie hooked up; they fled because the final seasons went out of their way to keep them apart and everyone got frustrated waiting.
Good luck telling this to many modern TV comedy writers, who’ve taken it as gospel that Moonlighting went from phenomenon to fiasco overnight because audiences prefer their romantic gratification to be perpetually delayed, and who thus put their characters through all manner of stupid, contrived delays to coupledom out of fear that happiness equals ratings death.
But damn, was it fun for a while.
“Did I happen to mention, did I bother to disclose, that this man that we’re seeking has a mole on his nose?” said David in an early episode, talking his way past a security guard. “I’m not sure of his clothes or anything else, except he’s Chinese, a big clue by itself.”
“How do you do that?” Maddie asks afterward.
“Gotta read a lotta Dr. Seuss,” he replies.
—MZS & AS
Taxi (ABC, 1978–1982; NBC, 1982–1983) Total score: 87
Midway through the first episode of Taxi, new cabbie Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner) tells veteran Alex Rieger (Judd Hirsch) that she’ll be working at the Sunshine Cab Company only part-time while she focuses on her real career in the art world.
“Oh yeah, I know,” Alex tells her. “We’re all part-time here. You see that guy over there? Now, he’s an actor. The guy on the phone, he’s a prizefighter. This lady over here, she’s a beautician. The man behind her, he’s a writer. Me? I’m a cabdriver. I’m the only cabdriver in this place.”
This is at once a funny monologue and a dark existential statement. Alex is comfortable with his station in life, and possibly so is cruel dispatcher Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito), but everyone else at Sunshine dreams of something bigger—something that the very nature of a situation comedy set at the cab company garage makes impossible. If a character on Taxi were to ever achieve his or her dream, they’d be off the show. Aspiring actor Bobby Wheeler (Jeff Conaway) is written off in exactly this manner after the third season, and when he returns in the fourth, we learn that his big break turned out to be less than he’d hoped. They come to the garage each day, hoping for something better, but make do with a life behind the wheel of a big yellow cab.
Most sitcoms have static situations—if Gilligan and the castaways were ever rescued, there would be no show—but rarely has a comedy been as acutely aware of the futility of its characters’ dreams, or been tinged with so much sadness.
Taxi debuted near the end of a decade where shows like M*A*S*H and All in the Family had proved that audiences would accept serious moments and episodes from their sitcoms, and Taxi fit perfectly into this new tradition. It features two of the great comic creations the small screen has ever shown us in the Napoleonic, bitter Louie, and the blissful ’60s burnout “Reverend” Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd). The scene where a frustrated Bobby tries to help the addled Jim pass his driving test (“What does a yellow light mean?” “Slow down!” “What… does… a… yellow… light… mean?”) is on the short list of the funniest sitcom sequences ever.
And yet the show could seamlessly shift from broad hilarity to dark, moving drama. The first episode climaxes with the bittersweet reunion between Alex and the teenage daughter he hasn’t seen since she was a toddler—a scene that acknowledges all the messy emotions of the situation, and one that a network development executive told me would never be allowed in a comedy pilot today. It set the tone for all that followed.
When I think of Reverend Jim, the first image isn’t the driving test, but him addressing the empty suit of his late father, trying to make peace in death with a man he could never relate to in life, on the verge of tears as Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” plays. When I think of Louie, my mind first goes to his confession to Elaine about his humiliating annual trip to buy clothes from the husky boys section of the department store. Even an unabashedly cartoonish character like immigrant mechanic Latka Gravas (performance artist Andy Kaufman at his most commercial) comes to suffer from multiple personality disorder, and though the condition is often played for laughs—as in an episode where he turns into an uncanny duplicate of Alex—there’s always an underlying sadness to those stories because it’s a problem that none of Latka’s friends can help him with.
The show’s run echoed the cabbies’ own deferred dreams. It was a success at first, but only be
cause it aired after the much broader Three’s Company, then scuffled through two more seasons before ABC gave up. There was brief talk of its blazing a trail to cable by going to HBO—along with jokes that the first shot of such a fifth season would be of Henner’s bare breasts—but instead it wound up on NBC, where it was paired for its final season with a new show from former Taxi writers Glen and Les Charles called Cheers. Cheers would eclipse its predecessor in commercial success and prestige, leaving Taxi behind like the Sunshine Cab drivers watching a colleague finally hit it big in their dream job while the rest of them had to keep hanging around that big, dark room where they spent every night together.
—AS
East Side/West Side (CBS, 1963–1964) Total score: 86
“As far as trivial, meaningless dramatic series are concerned, we’ve had it,” East Side/West Side star George C. Scott told TV Guide in November 1963. “We have got to come to grips with controversial themes. We’ve got to try to say something about the way we live.”
And they did. Shot in New York City, this series from Fred Coe, Herbert Brodkin, and TV producer and talk show host David Susskind followed employees of the Community Welfare Service (CWS), a private agency of social workers tasked with helping residents of a tough New York neighborhood. George C. Scott played Neil Brock, a gruff, mercurial fellow whose close-cropped hair, cheap shirts, and ugly ties testified to his lack of interest in dazzling with first impressions (he was later revealed to be a Polish immigrant’s son who had changed his last name). Elizabeth Wilson played his coworker, Frieda Hechlinger; Cicely Tyson, the first African American actress to land a recurring dramatic role on TV, played the office’s secretary, Jane Foster, who soon began working in the field.
TV (The Book) Page 24