‘Cosby Show’ Looks Back in Triumph

In a month that has been awash in heavily watched TV nostalgia shows, NBC has managed to save the best for last.

Sunday at 9 p.m., “The Cosby Show: A Look Back,” captained by the show’s star and co-creator, Bill Cosby, takes a two-hour look at the landmark program that reinvigorated the sitcom format and the show’s network. It also gave television an African American-oriented series against which all others are measured.

The show, which debuted in the fall of 1984 and ran until September 1992, featured stand-up comic Cosby and Phylicia Rashad as the upscale parents of five children.

The family--four girls with a boy in the middle, ages ranging from 5 to 20--offered a fountain of material reflecting Cosby’s philosophy of warm and caring child-rearing tinged with tough love.

That it was funny, hugely successful and dominated by a black cast left a large imprint on NBC and the television industry in general and on the pop-culture history of the country.

“The show arrived at a time when most executives and even members of the viewing audience were of the opinion that the sitcom had had it, that it was no longer popular,” Rashad said. “It proved to be very popular, and many sitcoms were added to the fall schedules for years to come, even now.”

Rashad recalled the NBC programmer who put the show on the air when other networks had passed. “We had a great champion in Brandon Tartikoff,” she said of the much-praised executive who died in 1997. “He saw something he liked.”

The show proved to be at the headwaters of what NBC has come to promote as its “Must-See TV” franchise on Thursday night. For five seasons, the show was at the top of the Nielsen viewership ratings lists. Shows including “Cheers,” “Family Ties,” “Night Court” and “L.A. Law” benefited from following “The Cosby Show” at 8 p.m.

The two-hour retrospective, taped before an admiring audience, offers a pastiche of clips, outtakes and audition tapes, along with observations on the show’s history and impact from people who watched as well as those who produced the show.

Rashad, who played Clair to Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, notes the show’s radically different approach to black family sitcom humor. The family, headed by a doctor and a lawyer, was upscale, warm and loving, the kids respectful toward their elders.

“It was the first time we’d seen an African American family portrayed in this light of truth,” she said.

It’s hard to overestimate the popularity of “The Cosby Show.” And its popularity, coupled with its cast makeup and African American themes, made it significant.

“First of all,” said Robert J. Thompson, who was not part of the show, “it was arguably one of the most popular TV series ever in the history of the medium.”

Two shows, he noted, have topped the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons: “All in the Family” from 1971 to ’76 and “The Cosby Show” from 1985 to ’90. “That’s something only those two shows ever achieved.”

Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and director of the school’s Center for the Study of Popular Television, likened the show to television’s popular sitcoms of the 1950s and early ‘60s.

“On one level, ‘The Cosby Show’ showed how enduring the old notion of ‘Father Knows Best,’ ‘The Donna Reed Show’ and ‘Leave It to Beaver’ really was in the American culture,” said Thompson. “Even back in the ‘50s when they aired, it was sort of utopian, it was catnip for the public. Who would think that in the ‘80s, after Watergate and Vietnam, that format would still have a few tricks up its sleeve? It was that way for two orbital shows, too, ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Who’s the Boss?’”

The TV special focuses on the fun generated by the sitcom, in front of and behind the camera.

The actors who played four of the Huxtable children are on hand: Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played 14-year-old Theodore, or just Theo; Tempestt Bledsoe, who played Vanessa at age 8; Sabrina Le Beauf, the oldest Huxtable at 20; and Keshia Knight Pulliam, now a radiant young woman after being so familiar as the precocious 5-year-old, Rudy. (Also on hand: Raven-Symone, who stole hearts when she joined the cast in 1989 as the toddler Olivia.)

Lisa Bonet, who played teenage daughter Denise, turned down an invitation to appear on the retrospective. “The whole experience and energy behind it felt disingenuous and motivated by corporate profit,” the 34-year-old actress told People magazine. “I felt devalued and disrespected.”

The show’s clips and recollections generally revolve around the humor found in family situations, the tightness of the Huxtable clan and the sizable contributions of Rashad, who could both relate to Cosby as a spouse and deal with the children too.