The Cosby Show Analysis

“The Cosby Show” (1984-1992) was a situational comedy that followed the Huxtable family. The Huxtables were a middle class african american family made up by the parents Cliff and Clair and their children Sondra, Denise, Theodore, Vanessa, and Rudy. Throughout it’s eight year run, “The Cosby Show” made a big impact. “The Cosby Show” has been significant to media history due to the fact that it showed what major racial issues were happening when the show was on the air, revolutionized race in situational comedies and made the sitcom more popular again.

The situational comedy has been a trend in television that has a long history and has been happening since the early days of “I Love Lucy” and the “Honeymooners”. Since then, the sitcom has
However, this is just the small repercussion that happens when you don’t portray stereotypes. “The Cosby Show” dealt with a lot of the racial unrest that was happening at the time in the country, they just didn’t do it outright. In his essay “The Biggest Show in the World: Race and the Global Popularity of The Cosby Show, Havens says “The political issues that did surface on the show were not flash-in-the-pan popular topics that interest a sitcom like Murphy Brown, but long-standing political concerns like education and Civil Rights.” By having the main characters of the show middle-class, they had to shape the issues they talked about and the way they talked about them differently. As a rich family living in a nice house, the Huxtables didn’t deal head on with the Civil Rights issues that poor black people were facing. So instead being false, the show dealt with the issues in a way that was indirect and displayed a different viewpoint. “The Cosby Show avoids this brand of humor and other negative characteristics (isolated, matriarchal, violent, and conflict prone), observed in black television families of the 1970s” (Merritt). Since the situational comedy began, every episode seems to deal with what is happening in the world directly. It was “The Cosby Show” however,
In the textbook “Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States”, Hilmes writes “The Cosby Show, created by comedian and actor Bill Cosby in cooperation with former ABC executives Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner and coproducers Ed Weinberger and Michael Leeson, is widely credited for bringing back the family-centered sitcom and for leading NBC to its ratings success in the late eighties and early nineties” (153). During it’s eight year run, “The Cosby Show” was popular and well-received as it won Golden Globes, Emmys and other various awards. The sitcom had gone out of fashion and audiences gravitated towards dramas in the early eighties. However this changed, “Declared dead in 1982, the sitcom had made a roaring comeback by the late eighties, as drama moved from strength to strength. But times had changed; these new families departed from the TV norm” (Hilmes 153). These norms were the cause of the downfall of sitcoms. It was clear that audiences were looking for uniqueness and diversity in a sitcom, instead of the typical middle-class white family that was always being represented. So when the Huxtable family came around, audiences were more inticed to watch as it was something different and refreshing. For black audiences, it was also a chance to see their race represented on television, as the only other impactful sitcom centered around a black family before was