The Cosby Show


The Cosby Show is an American television sitcom that ran from 1984 to 1992. Starring Bill Cosby, the sitcom was first broadcast on September 20, 1984 and ran for eight seasons on the NBC television network, until April 30, 1992.

Bill Cosby had a great deal of creative control over the show, which was unusual for a star at that time but has become commonplace now. Cosby wanted the program to be educational as well as entertaining, reflecting Cosby's own background in education. He also insisted that the program be taped in New York City rather than Los Angeles, where most television programs were taped. The show was set in Brooklyn, NY.

Overview

The show focused on the Huxtable family, an upper-middle class family living in Brooklyn, New York at 10 Stigwood Avenue.[1] Patriarch Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable, an obstetrician gynocologist, and his attorney wife Clair Hanks-Huxtable presided over a raucous yet loving household. The show involved the usual difficulties of children growing up, an example being son Theo's experiences of dealing with dyslexia, based on Cosby's real-life child Ennis who was dyslexic. The show was very much centered on Cosby's real life, and portrayed his children's lives as well.

The show was extremely well-regarded, winning six Emmys, as well as three Golden Globes, five NAACP Image Awards, and a Peabody Award. It was also notable as being highly popular with white viewers and around the world, unlike many other television shows featuring mainly African-American characters. The show has been praised for its portrayal of positive child rearing methods.

For instance, in the first episode, Heathcliff confronts his son about his poor grades and Theo responds that he should accept his son's weaknesses and love him unconditionally because they are father and son—a typical sentimental idiom in family sitcoms of that time, and one which generated the typical applause from the studio audience. Heathcliff, however, to the audience's surprise and amused approval, immediately and angrily calls this sentiment "the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life," completely rejecting the notion that loving his son means he must quietly and willingly accept it when the boy does not give his best effort in school, and famously threatened him with the often quoted line, "I brought you into this world, and I'll take you out!"

At the time of the show's original broadcast, some people criticized the series for presenting an unrealistic portrayal of an African-American family (though upper-middle class professional African-American families did exist and others praised the show for noting this), and for not addressing black-white relations and contemporary issues such as poverty and the AIDS-HIV epidemic. Others felt that the show was simply a portrayal of what African-Americans could potentially become. They also felt that portraying an African-American family as a normal family with normal, and largely wholesome, family issues was generally a positive contribution to issues of race in the United States.

The sitcom had numerous guest star appearances, including Tito Puente, Stevie Wonder, Robert Culp, Willie Colon, Plácido Domingo, Tony Orlando, Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, Danny Kaye and Frank Robinson. Additionally, many actors had the show as their launching pad to success. Examples include Raven-Symoné, Angela Bassett, and Adam Sandler among others. John Ritter guest starred on an episode with Amy Yasbeck, whom he soon started a relationship with and married eight years later, and Sammy Davis Jr appeared in an episode in 1989 playing a soon to be great-grandfather who does not know how to read. It was one of the last television appearances of Davis (he would die the next year). During every episode of the following season, Heathcliff is seen wearing a black circle pin with "SDJR" on it, in memory of Mr. Davis.

The popularity of The Cosby Show was often seen as a symbol of hope and progress for African-Americans in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ironically, as the final episode was airing on April 30, 1992, a series of race riots was raging throughout the city of Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the previous day's controversial verdict in the Rodney King trial.

The exterior of the Huxtable home was actually the brownstone facade of a private residence at 10 St. Luke's Place near 7th Avenue in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. That home is not a single family home but rather was divided into an owner's duplex and four tiny one-bedroom apartments. When looking out of the door of the house into the street, the fence of the park really located across the street from the real house is used as a backdrop.

The show featured several unusual dream episodes. One guest starred The Muppets, with Cliff falling asleep after overeating and finding himself in a nightmare populated with muppets. (This was no coincidence as head writer Matt Robinson was the first actor to play Gordon Robinson on Sesame Street and Bill Cosby had appeared in another CTW production, The Electric Company. In addition, Clarice Taylor, who had a recurring role as Cliff's mother, Anna, also had a recurring role on Sesame Street, as David's grandmother. Also, both Sesame Street and The Cosby Show were taped at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York.) Another was about all the men of the cast experiencing pregnancy.

The final episode broke the fourth wall. While dancing, Cliff and Clair step away from the Huxtable home, which was revealed to be a set surrounded by cameras and an applauding studio audience (including then-New York City mayor David Dinkins).

Cast


Recurring cast members

Notable guest stars

Running gags

Theme music and opening sequences

The show's theme music is called "Kiss Me," composed by Stu Gardner and Bill Cosby. Seven versions of this theme (one theme per season, with the exception of the eighth and final season) were used during the run of the series, making it one of the few television series to use multiple versions of the same theme song in the course of a series.

The opening credits for the first season featured the Huxtable family playing sports in the park. This sequence heavily used zooming and frame-by-frame movement of each still in the sequence. For the season two opening sequence, the opening credits changed feature a gray room with the cast dancing. This began a running theme for the opening credits for the rest of the series as the producers attempted to change the sequence each season.

Ratings

The Cosby Show is one of two television shows, All in the Family being the other, that has been number 1 in the Nielsen Ratings for 5 consecutive TV seasons.

The ratings for each season, at the end of the season, were:

DVD releases

Seasons 1 and 2 have been released by Urbanworks until First Look Entertainment acquired Urbanworks in early 2006. Future seasons of The Cosby Show are planned to be released by First Look Entertainment along with A Different World in 2007. [2]

Magna Pacific [3] have released seasons 1,2, and 3 of The Cosby Show on dvd in Australia and New Zealand, with similar artwork to the American copies of season 1 and 2, although season 2 is red rather than blue. Each Australasian cover also features the tag-line: "In a house full of love, there is always room for more."

A Different World

The Cosby Show 's producers created a spin-off series called A Different World, which initially dealt with the life of Denise, the second eldest Huxtable daughter, at Hillman College, a fictional historically black college. Denise was written out of the series after its inaugural season and the following season was revamped with the addition of director Debbie Allen and new characters. Fortunately for Lisa Bonet, she became a recurring The Cosby Show character in Seasons 4-5 and a star again in Seasons 6-7.

Parodies

In 2000, a sixth-season episode of Moesha entitled "Definitely Not the Cosbys" paid tribute to The Cosby Show. In a "fantasy" sequence, the Moesha cast assumes the roles of Cosby Show characters, with William Allen Young (Frank) as Cliff, Sheryl Lee Ralph (Dee) as Clair, Brandy (Moesha) as Denise, Ray J (Dorian) as Theo, Shar Jackson (Niecy) as Vanessa, Marcus T. Paulk (Myles) as a male Rudy, and Lamont Bentley (Hakeem) as A Different Worlds Dwayne Wayne.

The cartoon sitcom The Simpsons once aired on Thursday nights in the same time slot as The Cosby Show. The show's creators introduced a character named Doctor Hibbert, a relentlessly cheerful, African-American doctor who was intended as something of a parody of Cliff Huxtable. When off-duty, Dr. Hibbert often sports loud sweaters similar to the ones often worn by Cliff. In one early Simpsons episode he is seen at home with a family drawn to resemble the Huxtables. When The Cosby Show went off the air, The Simpsons did a brief tribute at the end of the "Three Men and a Comic Book" episode. Bart notes, "If I had a TV show, I'd run that sucker into the ground!"

Another parody was portrayed by Family Guy in the episode, "Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater", where a cartoon sketch pictured a character resembling Dr. Huxtable going into a long rant that a Theo-lookalike was only briefly able to interrupt by yelling "Dad, you're not listening to me! I have a serious problem! I got a girl pregnant!" This parody poked fun at the show's failure to address more adult-themed problems.

In another episode of Family Guy, Brian Goes Back to College, Peter and his friends are at an 80s TV convention when Peter says "Look! Bill Cosby Aerobics!" The camera then pans to a group of people, led by a Cosby lookalike, dancing to the theme music of The Cosby Show, parodying the normal entrance to the show.

The Cosby Show was sent-up by Australian Comedy show Fast Forward with had Steve Vizard as Cliff Huxtable.

Trivia

Show Mistakes

Awards & nominations

Awards Won

Emmy Awards

Golden Globe Awards

Awards Nominated

Emmy Awards

Golden Globe Awards

Criticisms

In their 1992 book Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences & the Myth of the American Dream (ISBN 0813314194), authors Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis report on an audience study and argue that the Cosby Show obscured the issues of class and race and reinforced the myth that African Americans have only themselves to blame if they don't succeed in society.

It should be noted, however, that the Cosby Show was one of the few shows on air that portrayed African Americans not only as the main characters, but in non-stereotypical roles.

See also

External links

Citations