Nina Metz: With the docuseries ‘We Need to Talk About Cosby’ on Showtime, director W. Kamau Bell dares you to look away

In Season 2 of “The Cosby Show,” there’s an episode titled “Happy Anniversary” wherein the entire Huxtable family gathers in front of their living room staircase to perform a lip-synced version of the slinky rhythm and blues classic “Night Time is the Right Time.” It’s an exuberant moment, created to celebrate the wedding anniversary of Dr. Huxtable’s parents, and it is full of love and style and joy. And it’s funny.

In his new four-part docuseries “We Need to Talk About Cosby” (premiering Sunday on Showtime), director W. Kamau Bell shows this clip to a number of people he interviews, including Danielle Morgan, who is an assistant professor at Santa Clara University. Like so many others who appear in the docuseries, a range of emotions wash over her face as she watches.

“One of the main things I think about when I see that clip is just, there are a million reasons we don’t want what we know to be true about Bill Cosby to be true, and I think that clip highlights so many of them,” she says. “It’s just such a bright and warm scene and I think many of us don’t want to lose the way that those kinds of scenes make us feel, and what they meant for us watching at the time.

“But the reality is the reality.”

This is a thoughtful and often overwhelming deep dive — a four-part series almost has to be overwhelming if it intends to be serious-minded, and this project absolutely is. Bell is urging us all, but also importantly himself, to grapple with these conflicted emotions that come up when considering Cosby’s legacy and influence as a performer alongside the numerous allegations of sexual assault that have been made against him.

“Is there something we can learn from all of this?” Bell wondered in a recent interview with the Huffington Post. “Not a gossipy conversation about Bill Cosby. We don’t need to gossip about Bill Cosby. The title could be, ‘Do You Want to Talk about Bill Cosby?’ Because I know a lot of people do not want to talk about Bill Cosby on all sides of this issue.”

Among those who declined to appear on camera are any members of “The Cosby Show’s” principal cast, although there are a handful of actors who had small roles and crew members who describe what they saw and experienced on set. Bell, who is a comedian and host of CNN’s “United Shades of America,” also interviews other comedians as well as academics. The series primarily centers Black voices, as it should; there are strong conversations here about what it means to let go of someone who was a beacon of Black positivity (mostly, excepting his notorious pound cake speech, which is also discussed here) and excellence. The series also features a number of women, Black and white, who have made allegations against Cosby. They tell their stories here and they are devastating.

The series offers a good deal of what I found to be useful analysis of the early portions of Cosby’s career. Why, we’re left to wonder, did Cosby feel so free to build an entire bit around drugging women with Spanish fly — material he was still trotting out decades after it first appeared on his 1969 comedy album titled, ironically, “It’s True! It’s True!” Maybe the joke is “innocent, maybe not,” says Todd Boyd, professor at the University of Southern California, “but if you listen to that Spanish fly joke, the (expletive) tells on himself.”

Here’s UNC at Chapel Hill professor Tressie McMillan Cottom’s assessment: “There was this narrative that had always been there in the undercurrent of his comedy about drugging women that we had all mutually agreed to never talk about and never connect the dots.”

Cosby’s career as an actor first took off when he starred in “I Spy” (which ran from 1965-1968) and it was during this period that Cosby successfully pushed back against the practice of using of white stunt performers (in dark makeup) for Black characters on the show, namely him. That he used his burgeoning clout to open the door for Black stunt performers is meaningful. Full stop.

The thing about good acts, though — whether motivated by cynicism or sincerity — is that they don’t cancel out the bad acts.

By the ‘80s, Cosby had molded his persona to become America’s Dad. “Not Black America’s Dad, he was being called America’s Dad,” says Jelani Cobb, who is a contributing writer to The New Yorker magazine and a professor at Columbia University. “And I don’t think it’s overstating it,” he adds, “Cosby really almost single-handedly expands the vista of what people think Black people can be in American society.”

So there’s that.

There’s also this: “The veneer that Cosby represented was always about progress,” says Kierna Mayo, former editor-in-chief of Ebony magazine. “Folks who were thinking about what could be next and what could be possible, he stepped in that gap. But the truth of the matter is that the machine that creates Hollywood, the machine that even allows a Cosby to come forth, is one that’s rife with misogyny.”

That’s what came through strongest for me here: The power dynamics.

Not just the power dynamics that exist in Hollywood at large, but the power dynamics that exist one-on-one, person-to-person, between a famous and beloved celebrity and a young person dazzled by fame or looking for help with their career.

Those power dynamics never exist in a vacuum. All it requires is enough of the right people averting their eyes to keep the status quo firmly in place.

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