Looking back at season 1 of The Cosby Show, it's easy to forget
that momentous history was being made. Not only did this
immensely popular sitcom hold the #1 spot among all network TV
shows for five consecutive seasons (a record that still stands),
but it promoted an evolutionary progression that influenced the
entire TV industry from that point forward. African Americans had
enjoyed sitcom success in the past (on Julia, The Jeffersons, and
Good Times), but the idealized family of Cliff and Clair Huxtable
(Bill Cosby and Phylicia ad) represented a new and quietly
revolutionary perspective; married for 21 years with five
children (one in college, a detail unmentioned in the pilot
episode), the Huxtables were happy and successful (he's a doctor,
she's a lawyer), and issues of race were almost entirely
irrelevant to the show's universal appeal. Making their
Thursday-night debut on September 20, 1984, they were conceived
by Cosby (as "executive consultant Dr. William H. Cosby Jr.,
Ed.D."), cocreators Ed. Weinberger and Michael Leeson, and
executive producers Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey, with a
matter-of-fact approach to upgrading the African American image,
built upon Cosby's rubber-faced popularity as a stand-up comedian
and rooted in the complete and unbiased integration of the black
experience into the American mainstream. More to the point, The
Cosby Show was eminently respectable family entertainment,
perhaps too squeaky-clean for some tastes, but immediately
popular at a time when Eddie Murphy (in Beverly Hills Cop) was
honing a more profane image that Cosby disapproved of.
The show was also perfectly cast for mass appeal, from the
irresistible precociousness of Keshia Knight Pulliam (as the
youngest and most charming Huxtable daughter, Rudy) to the
stylish adolescence of Lisa t (years before her controversial
role in Angel Heart) as 16-year-old Denise; Malcolm-Jamal Warner
as outspoken teenager Theo; Tempestt Bledsoe as sensible younger
daughter Vanessa; and Sabrina LaBeauf as college student and
eventual mother of twins, Sondra. Combined with the effortless
chemistry of Cosby and ad (credited in Season 1 as Phylicia
Ayers Allen), the entire cast forged an easygoing,
loosely-rehearsed dynamic that was genuinely familial.
Given The Cosby Show's immense popularity, it's deeply
regrettable that the exorbitant cost of original music rights
resulted in this DVD release of edited episodes that were
shortened, with different music cues added, for perpetual
syndication. Fans eager to see the original NBC broadcasts were
understandably outraged, and this shortcoming should be addressed
in DVD releases of subsequent seasons. In truth, the episodes
(including "Goodbye, Mr. Fish," a perfect example of the show's
universal appeal) are not significantly diminished by the careful
editing; for casual fans, the difference is barely worth
mentioning. And while the 90-minute bonus feature "The Cosby
Show: A Look Back" (a clip show originally broadcast May 19,
2002) suffers from the conspicuous absence of t (who by then
had mostly retreated from show business), it duly conveys the
long-term value (and moral values) of the series, which
singlehandedly restored the fortunes of NBC while embracing
familial togetherness that would inform many of the popular
sitcoms that followed its noble example. --Jeff Shannon