Cliff Huxtable’s Homecoming

Reacting to the news that Bill Cosby is developing a new family sitcom for NBC, Poniewozik invokes Michael J. Fox, another former star the network recently tried to revive:

NBC’s reasons for wanting Cosby back are evident. The question will be: why does Cosby want to go back to NBC? The problem with The Michael J. Fox Show wasn’t Fox, who was and remains a gifted performer. It’s that he was in a tepid, generic show that seemed to have no idea behind it but, “Michael J. Fox, back on your TV again!” Despite a lot of talent, The Michael J. Fox Show almost seemed to go out of its way to be as  unmemorable as possible, leaving it little selling point beyond the audience’s memories of Family Ties.

Likewise, Cosby was a famous name even when he brought The Cosby Show to primetime (with the same producers he’ll be working with now). But that wasn’t what made it great TV. It was that he had distinctive ideas about how to shake up the way families in general, and African American families in particular, were portrayed on TV, and he created memorable characters to express those ideas.

Willa Paskin is glad Cosby is coming back to TV, noting the decline of the black family sitcom since the ’90s:

Twenty-two years after he left television, Bill Cosby remains one of the few people who can get a black family show on a network again.

This is particularly mind-boggling given that the influence of The Cosby Show is all over television. Cliff and Clair Huxtable were exemplars of the now nearly ubiquitous TV-parenting technique that combines equal parts love and aggravation, and, when practiced at the high-level of Cliff and Clair, consists of very responsibly and reliably laughing at your children in instructive ways. No parent on any show from Modern Family to Mom does anything without Cliff and Clair hovering in the background, doing it a little better.

And Cosby’s recent stand-up material suggests that he is now positioned to be just as funny as a grandfather as he was as a dad. He seems to have been buffing the character of the slightly-doddering, cutting-in-flashes, exasperating and exasperated husband and grandpa for quite some time. 

Alyssa wonders why Cosby has to star in the show himself:

He’s 76, so is he going to play a grandfather whose primary role in the show, as Cosby’s has been in the real world of late, to tell parents who are in the process of raising their own children either that they’re doing it wrong, or how to do it better? Maybe that will work. And maybe Cosby will give a huge lift to the younger African-American actors who end up in his orbit, which I think would be the most important potential outcome of Cosby’s return to television.

But why is putting Cosby at the center of a show, rather even than having him create a show that stars other actors, the best option? … Because the number of black male characters on television are so limited, and even more so black men who have families, bringing Cosby underscores a depressing self-fulfilling assumption in Hollywood: that there are only a very small number of black actors that audiences will resonate to.