84 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
ON TELEVISION
THE SHOWMAN
“We Need to Talk About Cosby,” on Showtime.
BY DOREENS T. FÉLIX
ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
“
W
e Need to Talk About Cosby,”
a four-part Showtime series
from the director W. Kamau Bell, is
documentary as collage, as editorial, as
attempted community exorcism. In 2018,
Bill Cosby was convicted and impris-
oned for sexual assault, after sixty women
came forward with allegations of abuse,
drugging, and rape against the come-
dian. Bell’s documentary, which pre-
mièred at the end of January, comes
seven months after Cosby’s conviction
was overturned, owing to a legal tech-
nicality. This most recent development,
which, in fiction, one would refer to as
the twist, drapes Bell’s series in a kind
of under-acknowledged despair. Val-
iantly, Bell seeks to puncture the esteem
that Cosby still holds, and to convert
those who are in denial about Cosby’s
character, despite the fact that he has
admitted—under oath—to drugging
and assaulting women. The show pushes
hard against the edifice of conspiracy
that grounds thought and action and
worship in America, and conspiracy
presses its weight right back.
“It feels like we haven’t gotten to
the root of the discussion,” Bell says,
in his narration. Why is it so impor-
tant to get to the root of the discussion
about Cosby? Bell’s focus is distinct
from the exposure of Cosby as a serial
rapist. The documentary gives several
survivors the space to detail their ex-
periences at length, but the project is
not a work of investigative journalism.
Bell is looking to officialize the strong
emotion that Cosby provokes in at least
two generations of the fractured unit
called Black America. The energy is
that of a reckoning around the Race
Man, the prismatic figure through which
the notion of Black identity is formed.
The Cosby of this show is a spectre,
brushing up against every aspect of con-
temporary Black life for the past six de-
cades. Bell has made an ambitious piece
of Black media, addressed explicitly to
a Black audience.
“I am a child of Bill Cosby,” he says,
in voice-over. The director, who was
born in the seventies, was weaned on
Cosby’s animated kids’ programs “Fat
Albert” and “Picture Pages,” before pur-
suing his own career in activist-y com-
edy. Bell bases much of his perspective
on the strata of autobiography, though
he does not apply the same treatment
to Cosby. Bell’s Cosby springs into being
fully formed, not as the resultant son
of history, as Ezra Edelman constructed
his subject in “O.J.: Made in America,”
but as a unique colossus—a strapping,
hubristic talent who could not be made
by America but would remake America
in his image. The first hour of the series
covers Cosby’s meteoric rise to national
prominence in the sixties, and the mood
is nostalgic, jaunty. Working as a bar-
tender in his home town of Philadel-
phia, the handsome collegiate charms
patrons with his jokes. The kid makes
it to the clubs in New York City, where
he performs between folk acts, honing
his suave observational comedy. A few
years later, he’s a headliner; by the end
of the decade, he’s crossed the color line
in both television and film.
The broad strokes of Cosby’s early
career are traced by a Greek chorus of
journalists, academics, comedians, the
rare former colleague, and survivors.
With their help, Bell situates Cosby as
an opportunistic genius who played the
anxieties of white and Black America
against each other, in the service of an
initially “raceless” comedy. The enter-
tainer was lauded for his circumvention
of Black stereotypes. “He’s everything
you don’t see in Black characters on
television,” the Boston Globe editor
The series argues that Bill Cosby tainted us with an inexorable Daddy complex. Renée Graham says, when describing
