COSBY & CO.: WHAT MAKES THE SHOW A HIT?

Bill Cosby’s chauffeur-driven Toyota station wagon whisked along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It had been a long day of rehearsals at NBC Brooklyn Studios, and Cosby, puffing on a cigar in the front seat, was answering questions posed to the back of his head en route to his Manhattan town house.

Cosby is not rude. Twenty-seven hours later, he pointedly questioned a photographer’s approach to shooting his picture, then moments later graciously offered to provide the photographer with a ride back to town.

Rather, he is matter of fact: about why “The Cosby Show” is a hit, about how he fits better in the front seat than the back and, mostly, about the indisputable evidence that the people who program prime-time television still don’t get it .

He had heard a rumor that rock queen-turned-movie star Tina Turner was going to be cast in an episode of “Miami Vice”--as a madam. “I’ll put her on my show and I wouldn’t make her something as easy as a madam. . . , “ he said, his finger pointing as if at a network executive who’s been a bad boy.

“The networks have not even realized what the public is saying,” he said, citing the Turner bit as well as “Charlie & Co.”--which stars Flip Wilson and Gladys Knight in a family sitcom painfully close to “The Cosby Show” in all the wrong ways.

“These people watching us happen to be making a statement. They’re saying to the networks, ‘Listen, this is the kind of thing we would like to see--not just a family and children running around the house and the parents correcting and people hugging and kissing. B-u-u-t-t-t, we can also stand for shows where people have a human feeling and punchlines that we’re not embarrassed about because they deal with sexual parts of the body.’ ”

As Cosby sees it, his show has not so much a message as a point . And the point can be as slight as showing a girls-against-boys family football game, or seeing what happens when a 16-year-old gets her first car--both coming in “The Cosby Show’s” new season, which premieres tonight.

There are stories you won’t see too. “There are areas I’d like to get into that Bill doesn’t particularly want to,” said Jay Sandrich, the veteran director of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Soap,” who has been with “Cosby” since its inception.

Sandrich, relaxing in the Brooklyn Studio’s conference room before a rehearsal, spelled out his areas of concern: “I would like to deal a little more with what is really happening in some schools today. I would like to deal a little more with prejudice. They don’t acknowledge that they’re a black family.”

Asked about this later, Cosby questioned why the Huxtables, his onscreen family, should be expected to become involved with issues that other sitcom families don’t have to take up. “Everybody knows that they’re black; why does this family have to deal with that?” he said.

David Brokaw, a spokesman for Cosby, later referred to this difference of opinion as “a case of preference, not a source of tension.”

This is the closest the relationship between Cosby and his co-workers ever comes to being tested. The man of a dozen magazine covers and countless commercials, a hotter television commodity than pastel suits and jiggling flesh, Cosby understandably might turn out to be a difficult taskmaster. But those around him swear it isn’t so.

On the contrary, everyone interviewed said there is no stress on the Brooklyn set, as opposed to some of its Hollywood counterparts.

“You can scratch and dig and look as hard as you can, but you can look at our faces and see that it’s the truth,” said Caryn Sneider, supervising producer of “The Cosby Show.”

Indeed, the faces all looked relaxed at NBC Brooklyn, as though the air of success had smoothed out the furrows.

The writers, despite the pressure of last-minute rewrites, kidded around as they dined on cheeseburgers and homemade cookies prepared by their full-time cook. Between tapings, the cameramen, outfitted with new videotape cameras halfway through last season, good-naturedly traded off-color jokes.

Teen-age cast members Lisa Bonet (Denise) and Malcolm-Jamal Warner (Theodore) spent part of one afternoon chasing each other through the hallways outside their new dressing rooms, part of NBC’s recent $2-million renovation.

“Because of the way we work and the people we hire and because of Bill and the way he is, we have a very relaxed set, you may have noticed,” said executive producer Marcy Carsey, a pixie-ish woman with a big, easy laugh.

Cosby, often given total credit for the show by the media, readily confirms that “The Cosby Show” is fueled by collaboration, not creative tension. “It’s not a matter of who’s funny or who has the most power,” he said. “I’m looking for what’s best. We serve the viewer.”

The genesis of the episode titled “The Juicer,” taped during a reporter’s recent visit to the set, was typical of that approach. (The episode is scheduled to air next Thursday.)

Cosby had a germ of an idea: He wanted one of the Huxtable children to break the grandfather clock in the front hallway. “Sometimes we’ll write an entire story around a scene Bill would like to do,” said John Markus, “Cosby’s” 29-year-old head writer.

After the writers considered the seriousness of an accident involving broken glass, the clock became an electric juicer. Staff writer Matt Williams’ teleplay makes the kind of simple points Cosby loves: 6-year-old Rudy defies her father’s hands-off orders and attempts to make homemade jelly in the juicer; 12-year-old Vanessa (Tempestt Bledsoe fails to keep an eye on her sister as instructed, and Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable (Cosby) left the juicer in a dangerous state, plugged in with the top off.

By story’s end, Dad is getting chewed out right along with his kids, something Ward Cleaver or Jim Anderson never experienced.

“Now in a half hour, to put those three things across and have comedy to boot and show that the people in this house respect the parents and the parents respect the children and that there is a l-o-v-e that’s generated in this family--that is what makes this series liked by an awful lot of people,” Cosby explained on rehearsal day.

The episode became even stronger on Friday, the day after the show’s two taping sessions. That is the day when Sandrich and a handful of his creative staff typically move to Manhattan’s Editel editing facility, even as Cosby heads to a live engagement or to his family home in Massachusetts.

On “The Juicer,” “Cosby” staff writer-turned-actor David Smyrl blew his lines at least half a dozen times before a live audience and four cameras. But after Sandrich and his editor reassembled the scene from various choices of readings and reactions, Smyrl emerged with a tight, wise delivery.

Sandrich similarly boosted 6-year-old Peter Costa to scene-stealer status. Costa, whose cherubic face got laughs in “The Flamingo Kid,” was so taken with Cosby that he giggled every time they played a scene together. But eventually, Costa’s re-edited reactions got laughs even from the production assistants who had just seen the scene 14 times.

“Bill never really goes into my area,” said Sandrich, who picked up one of “The Cosby Show’s” three Emmy awards Sunday night. “He has never yet looked at a rough cut or said, ‘Why did you take that joke out?’ Never once.”

And if he did? “Eventually, I would probably do it Bill’s way, because this is Bill’s concept. We are here, in my mind, to allow Bill to bring to television what he brought to the stage--to do a monologue, but in dramatic form.”

Collaboration notwithstanding, the core of “The Cosby Show” is pure Cos.

The cast visibly brightens when he’s on the set and listens religiously to his advice, as when he lectured young Warner in the hallway about his approach to a particular scene.

Several times during rehearsals, Cosby would show a cast member how to play a scene, all the while noting Sandrich’s remarks from the control booth until the funniest, best alternative was found.

Phylicia Ayers-Allen as Clair Huxtable had her brightest moment in “The Juicer” when she mockingly recalled husband Cliff’s words to her as he brought home several in a successive line of stupid kitchen appliances.

At Sandrich’s suggestion, Cosby recited Clair’s lines and, after a little coaching, Ayers-Allen did a perfect imitation. She even made her eyebrows bob up and down: Waffles, Clair. I’m going to fix waffles every Sunday. Then as Clair, she adds the punchline, Until you had to clean the thing!

Can the success of “The Cosby Show” be duplicated? Cosby and his partners, former ABC executives Carsey and Tom Werner, may soon find out. They currently are developing a TV series for Lena Horne as part of their deal with NBC. According to one insider, the network has guaranteed the Carsey-Werner Co., in association with Cosby, a new series, and they don’t even have to make a pilot episode for the network to approve.

The same ratings strength that brought about that deal also determined that “The Cosby Show” won’t have to play the same games as many other returning shows.

Even as the Viceniks from Miami head for New York, “Knight Rider’s” souped-up Trans-Am gets a new body and Magnum, P.I. prepares to display his body more often, “Cosby” will keep feeding the public more heaping helpings of homespun humor.

“We have unlimited possibilities in the family,” said head writer Markus. “There is so much to explore that we don’t have to make any changes.”

“See, the pressure (to change) would come if we were doing what we wanted to do but the people were not tuning in,” Cosby said as his Toyota wagon pulled up in front of his town house. “Then would come the suits and the paisley ties and ‘Why don’t we have one of the girls say that she’s pregnant?’ and ‘Why don’t we have Cliff sued for malpractice?’

“But this is all I can do. I don’t know anything else. I don’t know how to make a change in this show.”