You've Got to See Ebony's Powerful 'Cosby Show' Cover

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The cast of ‘The Cosby Show’ (Getty Images)

Ebony has just released the cover for its November issue, which focuses on black families in America. It features the fictional Cosby family — who up until very recently were arguably the First Black Family of Network Television — in a cracked frame. The logline is “The Family Issue(s).” It’s a powerful image.

In an excerpt posted online from the accompanying cover story, Goldie Taylor writes:

Debuting in September 1984, The Cosby Show was based on the stand-up comedy routines of Bill Cosby, already a celebrated Hollywood staple, and loosely mirrored his family life. For eight seasons on NBC — five of which it was the country’s most-watched program, according to Nielsen ratings — Cosby’s portrayal of Heathcliff Huxtable — a physician, loving husband and doting Black father — reinforced the widely held virtues of the nuclear family, if not also unwittingly illuminating the hazards of respectability politics (the notion that if Black people simply act “good” and “behave,” the world-at-large will treat them as such.)
Now, some three decades later, as Cosby stands accused of sexually assaulting at least 40 women, Black America is left to grapple with his once-unimpeachable legacy. If Bill Cosby is finished, what does that mean for Cliff, and the rest of the tribe called Huxtable?

One of the most troubling parts of Bill Cosby’s fall from grace — aside from, of course, the literal dozens of alleged sexual assault victims who suffered silently for decades — is where it leaves the legacy of The Cosby Show. Putting aside some of its more troubling messaging, which I couldn’t begin to address as eloquently as Taylor does in the excerpt available now, The Cosby Show proved once and for all that a black-fronted network comedy could not only succeed, but dominate.

Bill Cosby’s onscreen family has clearly struggled with exactly this, none more so that Phylicia Rashad, his onscreen wife whose January comments about the accusations of abuse were widely circulated and trashed. “Forget those women,” Rashad told Showbiz 411. “I think it’s orchestrated. I don’t know why or who’s doing it, but it’s the legacy. And it’s a legacy that is so important to the culture … Someone is determined to keep Bill Cosby off TV, and it’s worked. All his contracts have been canceled.” Rashad claimed that she’d been misquoted and the original piece’s writer Roger Friedman clarified that the quote read differently than it’d been intended. “There was NEVER the meaning in 'Forget those women’ that she was saying to actually forget or dismiss then,” Friedman wrote. “She meant, 'those women aside’ — as in, she’s not talking about that, she’s talking about Cosby’s legacy being destroyed.”

Lisa Bonet, Tempestt Bledsoe, and Sabrina Le Beauf, who played the Cosbys’s eldest daughters on the show, have made no comment about the allegations of abuse. However, both Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Keshia Knight Pulliam, Theo and Rudy on The Cosby Show, respectively, are clearly troubled by the accusations. “All I can speak to is the man I know and I love. The fact that he has been such an example [and] you can’t take away from the great that he has done, the millions and millions of dollars he has given back to colleges and education, and just what he did with The Cosby Show and how groundbreaking that was,” Knight Pulliam said on Today. Speaking with the Associated Press, Warner recently said the show’s legacy had been “tarnished” by the myriad accusations of sexual assault against the show’s namesake.

“My biggest concern is when it comes to images of people of color on television and film, no matter what… negative stereotypes of people of color, we’ve always had The Cosby Show to hold up against that. And the fact that we no longer have that, that’s the thing that saddens me the most because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale.”