W. Kamau Bell wrestles with a former hero in first We Need To Talk About Cosby trailer
Bell directed the four-part Showtime docuseries about the scars left behind by Bill Cosby's self-destructed legacy
TV News Cosby
Bill Cosby is not currently in prison at the moment. That’s thanks to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which vacated, back in 2021, the sexual assault conviction that had put him there, arguing that prosecutors had violated the comedian’s due process rights during his original trial on sexual assault charges. Despite that technical freedom, though, Cosby’s reputation, and his image as America’s genial, sweater-clad dad, has been more-or-less utterly destroyed for the majority of people, courtesy of the years’ worth of reports about his predatory behavior toward women that had led up to the initial conviction.
The question of how to tackle the hole left behind when a giant of Cosby’s stature is revealed to have feet of clay appears to be at the center of W. Kamau Bell’s new Showtime docuseries We Need To Talk About Cosby. The new trailer for the four-part series features several snippets of Bell himself— who notes how obviously in the pocket he was for Cosby by self-describing as “a Black man, a stand-up comic…born in the ’70s”—trying to come to terms with the truth about his now-former hero.
Not that it’s all Bell talking in the trailer, mind you, which foregrounds an enormous number of people—including, notably, a large number of Black women—as they talk about what Cosby meant to them before the allegations against him became public, and what his image has become in the years since. The focus, at least from initial brush, is less on what Cosby is alleged to have done—we’re all fairly well-versed on the details at this point—but on what it felt like, especially for Black Americans, to have a personal hero reveal himself to be so much less, and so much worse, than he presented himself as being.
Bell directed all four episodes of We Need To Talk About Cosby. The series will air at Sundance on January 22, and is set to begin streaming on January 30.
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It’s not like there were any warning signs like Cosby playing a gynecologist who worked from a home office on TV *checks notes* oh wait…
I Spy something…rapey.
That was pure wish fulfillment on Cosby’s part. Not just the gynecology thing, but also having the power to prescribe pharmaceuticals.
He frequently prescribed Huxatonic™.
“Take one of these and hate me in the morning.”
Dr. Huxtable did not have a home office.
Well, there’s his old comedy routine ‘Spanish Fly’.
It’s not like there weren’t clues even before The Cosby Show.
“Cliff has an OB/gyn table in his fucking basement! With extra wide stirrups and disapears for hours?! Come on!”
Why do we need to talk about him? Lesson learned. This is waffling. Don’t tell me what I need to talk about. When you cut people out, you take the lesson and move on.
I need him (and his terrible wife) to die so I can enjoy his art again. Although even with that, knowing he was abusing the guest stars. . . .
I guess I can understand wanting to enjoy Cosby’s comedy again. But with so many other less problematic comedians out there to enjoy I just can’t see a need.
I never watched the sitcom, but obviously I saw much of his stand-up and was a big fan of “Fat Albert” as a young kid. But, no, this is definitely someone whose work I will never, ever revisit, even after they die. He’s gone forever.(Although, for better or for worse, the punchline “both ways” is so, so ingrained in the pop culture and my own reflexive comedic muscle memory that that one will probably never fully go away.)
That’s the thing. His comedy had informed my vocabulary for 30+ years by the time the accusations surfaced, to the degree that I sometimes forget that certain phrases come from him. It’s not so much that I need to watch “Himself” again, but I want to be able to go “SHOMP! SHOMP! SHOMP!” when I’m cutting a cake without worrying that I’m being offensive.(and if I ever get out of the gray and someone reads this, I guarantee there are people who hate him but will still smirk at those “SHOMP”s despite themselves).
He has exactly one decent joke anyway, about the snowball he kept in his freezer as a kid or something
I don’t think I’ll ever get the point where I can personally enjoy his stuff again, but either way, a good start would be to see him lose any rights to it in an absolute avalanche of civil suits.
I wish it could work that way (enjoying the art again) for Fat Albert. That was part of my childhood and there was so much good about it. The kids were all misfits and accepted each other. Albert was the popular one. They dealt with stuff like talking about child abuse.A monstrous person can create a thing that’s right in every way. It probably helps them convince themselves they’re a good person while they drug and rape women. I don’t want to hear his voice from the characters.
Ah, child abuse. Cosby built an entire comedy routine over the fact that he beat his kids every night before bedtime.
Is that what FA was talking about?
God I forgot about that. The bedtime sketch. “We can’t get a good night’s sleep unless we’ve had a good beating!”The Fat Albert episode doesn’t make light of it at all. It’s exactly what you’d expect from wholesome Schoolhouse Rock era 1970s kids programming. The episode summary:Fat Albert becomes concerned when his friend Patrice has bruises on her body. He eventually discovers she’s being abused by her mother. Fat Albert tries to convince her that she needs to tell someone. She’s initially reluctant, but Fat Albert persists and she goes to her teacher and efforts are made to get Patrice the help she needs.You can read all the summaries on Wikipedia and it’s a laundry list of wholesome. The first network rejected the series for being too educational.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fat_Albert_and_the_Cosby_Kids_episodesCosby got the series made, did the live intro and some of the lead voices. But other people wrote and directed it. The music was also really good. Maybe the series could be re-released without Cosby’s live intros and someone else doing his voices.
Watch the first episode again. There is a scene where he keeps rubbing Vanessa’s ears over and over again as he’s talking to her. *Shudder*
Rudy, the problem with The Cos’, ya see, is the snorkem flizzum with the skizzum florp, ya see, Theo!
Ah, yes. You must be…Made Up Words Cosby?
That’s right, Mitchell.
JELL-O Puuudiiinnng!
Ko-DAK filllm!
Where’s Larry Wilmore?
The Nightly Show was CC’s best attempt so far at replacing Colbert and I miss it so much. The fucking Bill Nye segment killed the show in the public eye and made it easy for the network to cancel. I still maintain that the segment was attempting to satirize anti-science and anti-intellectualism, but it 1) misfired badly and wasn’t very funny to begin with, 2) lacked any context when shared virally and made people think the whole show’s staff were complete morons. Well, Ricky Velez is and was indeed a grade-A moron, but I still think the whole thing was a joke that Nye wasn’t 100% in on and wasn’t a good joke to begin with.
I hope this also covers the original problematic aspects of Cosby. His 1990s reactionary, conservative streak. From the Washington Post: “His politics of respectability and black conservatism reinforced stereotypes of black pathology — criminality, anti-intellectualism, hypersexuality, family dysfunction — that gave America a reason to once again deny its culpability in maintaining the black underclass.”
pull up your pants son
With the hippin’ and the hoppin’ and the pants fallin’ down, and why don’t you kids speak english!
Yes. I vaguely remember his criticism of Eddie Murphy for his stand up act. And, yet behind the scenes Cosby was raping women. So awful.
Cosby is like school in the summertime.No class.
get a load of this smart kid over here, with no summer school!
I’m so looking forward to this. But it’s something I won’t be able to talk about at family gatherings. My parents are convinced of a conspiracy against Cosby dating back to when he wanted to buy NBC. Apparently the company has wanted to destroy him since then and this has nothing to do with women actually being his victims…And, look, I get being a Black person and not wanting to let go of someone so iconic. It feels like not just a strike against a personal hero of sorts but also a strike against Black communities. It can’t be true because we’ve held him as an example of excellence, and there’s a fear that “the best of us” actually being a monster casts a damning shadow on the rest of us if true.But you know what? It shouldn’t be hard. He’s a monster, Black people aren’t a monolith that can be represented by only a handful of people, and he’s spent decades trying to shame us anyway. I like his old stand-up, at least the handful of bits I can recall offhand, but that’s all he’s good for now.
I had no idea that he’d wanted to buy NBC! Off to the Googles…
PolitiFact has looked at this and determined that the Illuminati did not frame Bill Cosby. And the assault accusations came out long after he thought about buying NBC.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/nov/04/facebook-posts/no-bill-cosby-wasnt-framed-sexual-assault-stop-him/
I’m well aware of the gap in time there, but I’m pretty sure conspiracy theorists believe that time is but another tactic.
I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s literally memorizing Cosby’s old comedy albums. My father used to recite them to me from memory until I was old enough to play the records myself. I *loved* Bill Cosby.
But looking back, even his old stand-up routines had major issues. He did a whole routine on trying to buy Spanish Fly to get women to sleep with him and his buddy. He talked a lot — A LOT — about beatings his parents, especially his father, used to give him, without rancor. I thought that was okay and normal, but guess what? That was my life, too. Turns out it’s not right, never was right.
The buying NBC thing was in the 80’s, but he did have an $80 million pay or play deal for a new sitcom with NBC, when they decided to pass on the show, he wanted them to pay up, they got out of it on a morality clause, the result of a perfectly timed investigation into all of the drugging.
Don’t separate the art and the artist, all it has done historically is let men off the hook.
The art and the artist are intertwined.
Similar to how Marvel apparently purchased the MarvelMan/Miracleman character from Alan Moore, someone needs to quietly purchase the Fat Albert rights, hold on to them for some years, be careful to separate the content from “the creator” and then come out with some cartoons and comic books aimed at children. More racially diverse cartoon content is still needed.
Nah. Make up your own black characters based on someone else’s childhood.
Counterpoint: No, I fucking don’t.
Boy, am I glad William Hughes stuck around. The true soul of the A.V. Club is staying!
Self-destructive is the wrong goddamned word.
Dude, you forgot the first rule of Cosby.
1) I never liked Cliff Huxtable. He was an egotistical, stubborn, cheap, dream-killing man who lived in the past and dragged everyone else down with him.
2) Cliff was a millionaire but lived like a Depression Era day laborer. He refused to invest in Elvin and Sandra’s business and basically watched them struggle.
3) Cliff hated his family. He hated anyone who wasn’t like him. For some reason he thought because he was gynacologist, he was better than a Navy officer and looked down on a man who loved Vanessa and was a janitor. (Fuck you Cliff!)
4) By extension, Cliff was Cosby. A self-loathing, self-important man whose only goal was to make everyone around him feel less about themselves. I think there was a point in the early 90’s where he actually believed he was a doctor and not a stand up comic.
5) It was when Cosby gave his infamous Pound Cake Speech that he confirmed was a Republican. His tone deaf anecdotes and his misogynistic takes on things turned me off early.
6) Motherfucka had a OB/Gyn exam table in his basement. Red Flags everywhere!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_Cake_speech
I loved the show but the shitty way they treated their kids sometimes bothered me. Lots of calling them stupid (especially poor Theo) and mocking them