Remembering 'The Cosby Show' (1984-1992)

i watched it as younger on NICK AT NITE and liked some of it but man those later episodes were brutal

 

He mighta been right there, as Bonet's career never went much of anywhere after she left "Different World".

Can't say that was because of the nudity, but she definitely didn't work much after the 80s.

She also seems to have had a lot of plastic surgery over the years. Honestly, she's barely recognizable to me now!

 

I'm too lazy to link, but I started a thread about the Cosby live show I saw in... 2008? Sometime around that period.

He put on an insanely long show for a standup - it was like 2.5 hours or more.

People actually left early because the show ran so long!

 

She kind of resembles Courtney Cox these days. Hmm, wonder why?

Her post-Cosby-Show level of success is probably about comparable to that of the other kids in the cast. Meaning, the nudes scene in that movie probably was not much of a factor in her career one way or the other. It was just the unlikelihood of a child/teenage actor in a sitcom having much of a career beyond their initial show.

 

I cannot justify anything Cosby has done and it disgusts me that one of my favs turned out to be living breathing monster...so sad.

 

Bonet seemed to have more promise than the others, though. She got her own TV series spinoff - no one pushed for "Here's Theo!" - and then a big role in a serious movie with De Niro and Mickey Rourke.

That makes her lack of a substantial career a much bigger "flop" than for any of the other kids, as they didn't get the same A-list opportunities...

 

But Theo wore a sweater in one episode with his own face on it. No other Huxtable kid can say that.

 

Theodore Aloysius "Theo" Huxtable Image #207153 | TVmaze

 

Memorable scene from (I think) season two (1985-86), which was the show's greatest season:

 

Malcolm-Jamal Warner has been a regular on a FOX TV medical series THE RESIDENT playing a hot-shot surgeon, Dr. AJ Austin.

 

I have a question about syndication that applies here that maybe @Vidiot can answer for me.

When a show is in syndication, are the actors the only ones who get paid for reruns, or does everyone who is listed during the credits get paid?

I want to know because when all of Cosby's actions came out, most if not all of the stations that were showing The Cosby Show took it off the air. If everyone was getting paid, it seems like removing the show from the air would hurt all of the people whose name flies by at the end in tiny print more than it would hurt Bill Cosby. Should we have more sympathy for the behind the scenes people? Tough question for sure.

 

I think it depends on the contracts the people initially signed.

 

I get it if some people can't or choose not to separate the art from the artist, but a lot of you are saying that the Cosby show was never funny! I can't agree with you there. I also thought Elvin was a fun character and I think I enjoyed him as much of not more than any of the minor characters. Oddly enough I wasn't all that impressed with the actress that played the oldest daughter. The Bud/Kenny character cracked me up too. I think it was a great show! Not sure I can remember if anything i really liked was a later episode, other than if Raven Symone was in it, but I know I enjoyed many of the episodes.

I am usually able to separate the art from the artist and this is certainly a case where you'd have to, in order to enjoy the show.

The Gordon Gartrell Shirt episode was hilarious:



No 14-year-old boy should have a $95 shirt, unless he is on stage, with his four brothers.

 

I don't know the answer to your question about residuals, but the intent behind removing The Cosby Show from the air wasn't to punish Cosby or keep him from making more money. It was likely because the TV stations in question didn't want their channel associated with someone whose image had become completely toxic. And perhaps their sponsors were also telling them that they didn't want to advertise on a show with a serial rapist as the star, thereby associating their product with him. And perhaps the ratings were also dropping, or they presumed they would drop as a result of the scandal.

It is indeed too bad that everyone else involved with the show gets punished because of Cosby's crimes. But the business of TV isn't charity, and it wouldn't make sense for them to broadcast a show that damages their channel's or sponsors' image and/or hurts their profits, simply to help generate residuals for the cast and crew.

 

To some of us, (& we may be in the minority), it honestly just wasn't funny. A couple of caveats here, I rarely watch TV & haven't in decades, & I never found Bill Cosby to be all that & a bag of chips even before this show, as I mentioned in a prior thread, so my thoughts are likely skewed.

"Different strokes for different folks". Some like the show, some don't. Both schools of thought are valid.

 

And, never forget, the Synclavier's big moment to shine: J-J-Jammin' on the One

Stevie Wonder’s Cheesy Cosby Show Cameo Is the Most Influential Moment in Hip-Hop History

 

Very good points, thank you for bringing them to my attention.

 

I remember this series being shown on Channel 4 in Britain. Some people liked it, but I wasn’t one of them.

I don’t like sitcom at the best of times and there’s something very folksy and cutesy about American sitcoms of that period that I don’t get on with.

But some of it has stuck in my mind: I remember an episode that climaxed with all the children doing hip-hop dances and I remember the March on Washington (sic) one. However, my strongest memory is of a family friend with a much younger girlfriend who was a fan of a heavy metal singer called ‘Clyde’. ‘Clyde’ was represented by a copy of AC/DC’s High Voltage album and was presumably meant to be Angus Young. Much ridicule was heaped upon ‘Clyde’ and his ‘poetic’ lyrics and from the friend’s attempt to ‘get down’ with his younger g/f by pretending to like ‘Clyde’’s music.

I remember it particularly because I found it hard to believe the production unit couldn’t be bothered to fake up a ‘dummy’ Clyde album and instead used an album cover that was already famous across the western world. Lazy? Tight? What?

Always felt Cosby’s persona was fake and that he came across as a pompous, sententious blowhard, whoever he was pretending to be. Wasn’t at all surprised when he was ‘unmasked.’

 

I remember a lot of the first season's jokes were adapted from Bill Cosby: Himself, a 1982 concert film of his stand-up routine, which I thought was hilarious at the time. Not nearly as funny in the show, but I did watch it at the time and liked it (I was in my mid-teens). I agree, however, that they were too perfect. The one episode that really turned me off was when Claire was lecturing one of the kids about not wearing white after Labor Day, and how this was such a big deal. As a teenager, I got angry at that, since we were poor and my family couldn't afford to care about those kinds of things. It seemed elitist (and still does).

But now I can't separate Cosby's work from his crimes. There's no question he was a horrible person all the time he was presenting this wholesome front to the world. Thinking about this show just makes me sad now.

 

I remember seeing him play a lawyer on Dexter and it was a "holy crap, that's Theo!" moment when I figured out it was him. I hadn't seen him in anything since The Cosby Show.

 

I think it depends on their deal. The AFTRA actors (now SAG-AFTRA) get a small residual for X number of reruns, but in most cases the syndication money doesn't go forever. For a long time (1960/1970s particularly), the cast only got paid for the first seven national reruns. So if you were an actor on Gilligan's Island (say), you'd get a few thousand dollars the first 7 times the showed aired around the country, and then it completely stopped. The show owners, like Sherwood Schwartz and Phil Silvers (who financed it), made money forever and ever, getting a certain percentage of the syndication money for pretty much an infinite period.

SAG-AFTRA: Show Me the Money – Residuals 101

After the early 1970s, quite a few actors renegotiated their contracts and people like Carol O'Conner on All in the Family, Alan Alda on M*A*S*H, and similar heavyweights started receiving a guaranteed sum forever and ever, effectively making them a small co-owner of the show. Not everybody got that kind of money, but if you were high up on the credit list -- executive producers, co-creators, in the top 5 or so regular actors on a long-running hit show -- you would probably get a stipend for decades to come. By the 1980s, actors could become a millionaire many times over: that happened with Cosby, Family Ties, Golden Girls, Seinfeld, and shows at that level.

As the sums of money grew higher in the early 1990s, networks and studios began to balk at giving actors all those payments, and started insisting that they just get one "lump sum" payout for everything. As an example, Jason Alexander revealed in the late 1990s that he got zero royalties for all the Seinfeld reruns because Sony Pictures TV was too cheap to do it. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, who were co-owners, co-creators, and co-producers of the show, always got a percentage (which has made them each worth well over $600M today). As compensation, for the last couple of years of the show, the studio paid the actors about $1 million per episode, which was not as good as a residual but it was at least something. The actors got a little revenge when, a few years later, Sony decided to release a boxed set of all the episodes, with brand-new interviews shot especially for the DVDs. The other actors balked at participating, so Sony reluctantly paid them $1 million each for a 4-hour interview (and commentary tracks) for the home video release. Jason Alexander griped that he had trouble getting Sony to send him a free boxed DVD set.

Not everybody gets this kind of deal. I think by the end of Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston was only making about $250,000-$300,000 per episode by the final couple of seasons, which may sound like a lot but it's peanuts compared to the millions made by others on similar shows. Cranston also did not get any profit-participation. But at the same time, he said that being in the show (and winning so many awards) got him enough work to last for the rest of his life, and he was glad to have done it.

Writers, directors, and producers also get a small sum through their various guilds, and I think that's a standard agreed-upon minimum. Famous story told to me by somebody who was there: Martin Cohan, creator of Silver Spoons, got a check for $10 million dollars within a month or so of that show hitting syndication. He showed it to my friend, and his family was shocked that a piece of paper with that many zeros on it just showed up in the mailbox as a regular letter with an ordinary 1st-class stamp. Normally, residual payments were a lot lower, but certain "milestones" kick in if a show is on in a certain number of markets, or if it grosses over a certain amount, and suddenly the money goes way up.

It is absolutely true that when a show like Cosby gets wracked by scandal and gets removed from syndication, all the actors, directors, writers, and producers are hurt economically by losing money that they could have otherwise earned. Butr I think the reality is that an early-to-mid-1980s show is not going to play well today anyway, so the market for it now is not necessarily that big, but yes -- if every creative person on the show suddenly gets zero money, that's a loss.

 

There's a clip on YouTube of one of the writers of A Different World. He described a script run through where Lisa may have been a little stoned and falling asleep at the table.

He called her a little unprofessional.

Hey...it was the Lenny Kravitz years!

 

Yeah, OK. Suuuure.

 

Thanks Vidiot!

I nearly spit out my coffee when I read the 10 million for Silver Spoons. I used to watch it in prime time, but I bet the re-runs had a shelf life of 5 to 7 years tops.