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Cosby’s secret-agent character in “I Spy.”
As the civil-rights era was ending, Cosby
embraced his African American iden-
tity, growing out an Afro, and hosting
specials about slavery. Then he pivoted
to the embryonic paternalist whom he
would perfect in the eighties. Posing
on the cover of Ebony, with his wife
and their children, Cosby planted the
seeds for “The Cosby Show” and other
family-friendly projects yet to come. A
fealty encircled the entertainer, and kids
began to adore him, to accept him as
an educator, a moral authority. Cosby
became synonymous with racial prog-
ress and uplift.
O
ccasionally, Bell will reach a junc-
ture in the evolution of Cosby—
say, the comedian’s role as the titular
villain opposite Elliott Gould in the
much pilloried 1981 film “The Devil
and Max Devlin”—and wonder, What
if the film had been a success, and Cosby
had been typecast as demonic? Would
he still have engendered the good will
that allowed so many to defend him
once the accusations finally took hold?
It’s a kind of naïve magical thinking,
fuelled by Bell’s crisis of fanhood and
faith. His documentary seems moti-
vated, in part, by a feeling of guilt that
we all inadvertently provided an alibi
for a bully who actually despised us.
It probably goes without saying that
Cosby did not grant an interview for
this project. Because the subject is un-
available as a reactive character, the
drama of the show is fomented through
the building of analysis. The series is
especially strong when it dramatizes the
concurrence of Cosby’s increasing pres-
tige with accounts of his predatory be-
havior. Survivors dictate the narrative
in these segments, but Bell does not
identify the women as survivors when
we meet them. They might be mistaken
for cultural critics, and, in a way, that’s
precisely what they are: experts on how
fictional image and the power it pro-
vides can be leveraged to facilitate bad
behavior. Their stories span half a cen-
tury. Victoria Valentino, a former Play-
boy Playmate, describes Cosby drugging
and assaulting her in the late sixties;
Eden Tirl recounts being assaulted while
she guest-starred on “The Cosby Show”
in the eighties. Tirl’s testimony is punc-
tuated with a clip of her on the show,
playing a police officer.
“Bill Cosby, it seems to me, has been
leaving something like bread crumbs all
throughout his career, pointing to his
guilty conscience,” Kierna Mayo, a for-
mer editor-in-chief of Ebony, says, in the
series. Bell conducts a forensic examina-
tion of Cosby’s sets, books, and shows,
for references to “Spanish Fly” and the
like, in order to float the argument that
Cosby, an emboldened agent, conflated
the Heathcliff Huxtable character with
Cosby the man, tainting us all with an
inexorable Daddy complex. There is a
hint of panic in these segments, which
circle around the trite question “Can you
separate the art from the artist?”
Bell inspects the falsities in the Cosby
artistic myth. The comedian was known
for his education, but his credentials
were overblown: he received a bachelor’s
degree despite never having finished col-
lege, and his doctoral thesis, based on
“Fat Albert,” may have been ghostwrit-
ten. Meanwhile, “The Cosby Show,”
canonized as the hinge point in so-called
positive Black representation, was a well-
written sitcom that doubled as conser-
vative propaganda for the nuclear Black
family unit. Still, Bell readily accepts
the idea that Cosby was “America’s
Dad,” even as he introduces perspec-
tives that should complicate that as-
sumption. The documentary includes
a clip of Eddie Murphy performing
standup in the eighties, during which
he recalls Cosby chastising him for curs-
ing onstage. Murphy complains to Rich-
ard Pryor, who retorts that he’d like to
tell Cosby to “suck my dick.” Cosby
may have been the Black comedian who
“won” in the eyes of the mainstream,
but it was hip-hop, Cosby’s nemesis,
that won in Black America.
I’m no child of Cosby. I watched “The
Cosby Show,” in syndication, when it
was already a relic, and when Cosby’s
reputation had long soured among the
youth. Bell’s series falls short of ques-
tioning the systems of paternalism that
endowed a serial rapist with so much in-
stitutional control. Sometimes its Black
American audience is rendered as an
impressionable bloc, pinging between
the conspiracies of white supremacy and
that of Black respectability politics.
“We Need to Talk About Cosby” is
most compelling as an honest self-
reflection of Bell himself, both as an
artist and as a Black man invested in
the betterment of his people. By the
end, Bell is exhausted, seemingly ready
to relent. “There were times when I
was making this that I wanted to quit,”
he admits. “I wanted to hold on to my
memories of Bill Cosby before I knew
about Bill Cosby. I guess I still can. As
long as I admit, as long as we all admit,
that there’s just a Bill Cosby we didn’t
know.” Then what?
