The Cosby Show

BLACK, BROWN, AND BEIGE

SITUATION COMEDIES are the stock exchange of American desire. When breadwinning and housewifery were up, television gave us Leave It to Beaver and My Three Sons. As Americans gradually abandoned the crumbling ideal of the nuclear family and began to look for emotional satisfaction in the surrogate womb of the workplace, new shows like Barney Miller and M*A*S*H began to dominate the sitcom scene. Even Mary Tyler Moore, who cheerfully kept house for Dick Van Dyke in the forgotten days of the New Frontier, worked for a Minneapolis TV station and discreetly slept with handsome young men throughout the reign of Richard Nixon. It wasn't Mary's fault. It wasn't even Nixon's fault. The Nielsens made her do it.

Now that the toddlers of the Eisenhower era have finally grasped the levers of demographic power, what are today's sitcoms telling us about their desires and priorities? Not quite what you'd expect. No one, for example, ever makes jokes about power breakfasts on television. (Ambition is no laughing matter for baby-boomers.) And Hometown, CBS's attempt to cash in on the Big Chill mystique, was a major disaster. Who cares about aging revolutionaries in search of an extended family? What people really want to see on television these days are attractive young couples who have figured out how to make two jobs and three kids a viable proposition. That's why the most successful program on television today is NBC's The Cosby Show, a traditional family sitcom whose plots are straight out of Father Knows Best by Julia.

For white middle-class viewers, The Cosby Show is an exercise in face value. The dilemmas are more or less universal ones, the emotional tone generally convincing. The appeal of the program derives in large part from the strong baby-boomer orientation of the scripts. Cliff is a doctor, Clair a lawyer. Parental authority is tactfully exercised with warmth and wit. Sexism is a dirty word. Regular viewers with an eye for the implausible, though, quickly begin to develop a long list of unanswered questions. One assumes that the Huxtables employ domestic help, but we never see a cleaning lady, just as we rarely see Clair at work. Who took care of the youngest daughter before she started kindergarten? What kind of sex lives do the older daughters have? And what kind of middle-class family can drop $10,000 on a painting at Sotheby's?

Seen from this angle, The Cosby Show is a hip pipedream, a pristine vision of a successful nuclear family in the age of the working mother. But the black middle-class viewer, despite the fact that The Cosby Show systematically avoids racially oriented thematic material, is getting a very different message. For him The Cosby Show is surely a parable of ambition, a golden vision of upward mobility with a poorly hidden agenda. Each episode frankly advocates the kind of assimilation that Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael were supposed to have put the torch to long ago. The Huxtables live in what is obviously a white neighborhood. Their children will go to Ivy League colleges. The two oldest daughters are deracinated to an astonishing, even eerie, degree. (Indeed, one is already going to Princeton and summering in Paris; the other is a beige Valley Girl.) Racist slurs are never heard, racist behavior never encountered,, by the Huxtable family.

Bill Cosby's authentic "blackness" confuses the issue to some degree, but the point is that there is an issue to be confused. One sign of this confusion is the new credit sequence filmed for The Cosby Show's current season, in which all of the cast members are shown dancing. This sequence is obviously designed to provide conclusive evidence that Cliff, Clair, and the kids are really and truly black. Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley, we are surely meant to think, were never that cool.

One might explain all of this away were it not for the fact the producers of The Cosby Show are known to exercise deliberate and conscious control over every aspect of the program from the hairstyles worn by Clair and the girls to the posters on the wall of Theo's bedroom. Psychologist Alvin Poussaint is regularly consulted on how each new production wrinkle will be interpreted by the black community. Cosby himself has a doctorate (of sorts) in education, a fact that is announced to the world every week when the credits of The Cosby Show roll. The Cosby Show is, to use a hideously canting phrase, "politically correct." Is the long-repressed dream of black assimilation now politically correct as well? The New York Times tells us that a majority of American blacks approve of the way Ronald Reagan is doing his job. The Cosby Show is the hottest ticket on television among black professionals in New York. Something interesting is definitely going on here, but Bill Cosby is only telling us part of the story.

Fans of The Cosby Show will find some of this criticism churlish, and they have a point. No one has any business complaining about the fact that The Cosby Show is not set in Harlem. That's as fatuous as it is racist. No, the real problem with The Cosby Show is that is fails to dramatize its vision of black assimilation in the context of the world outside the four walls of the Huxtable household. Not only are the answers too easy, the questions never even get asked.