Destroying the memories of the Cosby Show

Bill Cosby’s allegations are said by some to be destroying the memories of one of the most significant television shows of the 80s, but according to others, that legacy is too strong to be destroyed.  How do you feel about the memories of the show today?

 Bill Cosby’s on-screen son, Malcolm-Jamal Warner has come out and spoken about how Bill Cosby’s assault allegations have damaged the legacy of The Cosby Show which he is keen to remind us all was a hugely positive show that corrected very harmful stereotypes in its time.  Do you feel that all that The Cosby Show did for the representation of racial integration will now be lost thanks to Bill Cosby’s alleged behaviour and the ongoing furore?

Warner played Theo Huxtable in The Cosby Show, and he spoke to The Associated Press this week, lamenting that the Cosby Show has depicted minorities in TV and film like others haven’t.  “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.”

Bill Cosby has been accused of an extraordinary number of offences from rape to drugging them, by more than 50 women according to Time.com.  And Warner is sad for what has been lost in the Cosby’s legacy, and in the legacy of his own career too.  The show, which ran for 8 years from 1984 to 1992 is listed as “TV’s biggest hit in the 1980s, and almost single-handedly revived the sitcom genre and NBC’s ratings fortunes”.

“It’s just a bad situation all around — for him, for his family, the women, their families, the legacy of the show,” Mr. Warner said to AAP.

The Cosby Show was a show about the Huxtable family, an upper middle-class African-American clan, living in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, New York, at 10 Stigwood Avenue.   The patriarch is Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician, son of a prominent jazz trombonist. The matriarch is his wife, attorney Clair Huxtable.  They had five children, four girls and one boy, Theo.

One of the daughters of the Huxtables, Rudy, played by Keshia Knight Pulliam,  said to Grio  “you can’t take back” the positive impact “The Cosby Show” had and continues to have on its fans.

In one of the first hearings on Cosby, a judge has ruled that three women who are claiming Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them will be able to sue the actor for libel as Cosby’s representatives said their accusations are baseless.  The three women cannot sue Mr Cosby over the sexual assault allegations due to the statute of limitations, but have instead sued him for libel because his representatives have said their challenge is “fabricated,” “ridiculous,” “absurd,”etc.  

U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni found on Friday that Cosby’s statements—amounting to an accusation that the women were fabricating their accounts of being raped—can be found true or false, according to The Hollywood Reporter.