The Cosby Show
The Cosby Show was an American sitcom started in 1984 starring Bill Cosby. The show ran for eight seasons on the NBC television network. The last episode aired on April 30, 1992.The show was centered around the Huxtable family, an upper-middle-class family living in Brooklyn. Patriarch Heathcliff (an obstetrician/gynaecologist) and his wife Clair (a lawyer) presided over a raucous yet loving household. In every way, they were an utterly typical American sitcom family, with the notable exception that they were African-American. The topics of the show were the usual difficulties of children growing up, a notable example being son Theo's battle to overcome his dyslexia, based on Cosby's real-life child Ennis who also managed to overcome the disability.
The show was extremely well-regarded, winning three Emmys as well as three NAACP Image Awards and a Peabody Award. It was also notable as being highly popular with white viewers and around the world, unlike many other television shows featuring mainly African-American characters. The show has been praised for it's portrayal of positive child rearing methods.
At the time of the show's original broadcast, some people criticized the show for presenting a unrealistic portrayal of an African-American family as wealthy and for it's lack of addressing black-white relations. Others felt that the show was simply a portrayal of what African-Americans could potentially become. The also felt that portraying an African-American family as a normal family with normal family issues was generally a positive contribution to issues of race in the United States.
The success of the show spawned a spin-off series called A Different World, which dealt with the life of the second-eldest Huxtable daughter at Hillman, a Fictional Historically Black College.
Cast
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