Before the Obama Show

— Twenty-five years ago NBC took a risk. In late September, the network launched a half-hour situation comedy about a prosperous, well-educated family whose children actually listened to their parents without a lot of wisecracks.

And, oh, by the way, the family also happened to be black. Young people today may have a hard time imagining it, but that was a big deal at the time. ABC had turned the show down but NBC, which was lagging in the ratings, was a bit more desperate. They won. The Cosby Show lasted eight years, five of them as the number-one sitcom in the Nielsen ratings.

Changing times give the show's anniversary special significance as we ponder how much the show helped change our times. The program is often credited with enriching the image of the African American family in the eyes of the world. I think it also deserves credit for reaffirming the value of the traditional American family unit, regardless of race or ethnicity, although with a more equal-partner role for the wife than used to be the typical case in 1950s sit-coms.

Before Cosby brought us the Huxtable family, networks had little interest in reviving the too-perfectly idealized strong-dad/omniscient mom/obedient kids format of Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver. But repackaging those old-school middle-class family set-ups with a middle-class black family sent a reassuring social message that subtly grabbed viewers' hearts: The American Dream was not for whites only.

Cosby sounds less grandiose when talking about his achievement, but no less ambitious.He simply didn't like the sitcoms TV offered.

His show offered a glimpse of the self-help initiatives for which Cosby has more recently crusaded across the country, despite critics-like Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson, author of Is Bill Cosby Right? (Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?)-who complain that he lets structural racism off the hook.

It is inevitable that we also wonder how much The Cosby Show helped to prepare the way for President Barack Obama's election. Cosby plays that down. "You can't get elected because of somebody you see on TV," he said.

But he was being modest about media power. Since John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard M. Nixon in 1960, no one has gotten elected president without paying due respect to the selling power of TV images.

I think President Obama owes a cultural debt to the Huxtables. What better way for the Obamas to calm voter anxieties than to present the nation with a real-life version of America's most beloved TV family.

Cosby says he enjoys what he calls The Obama Show. He should. He helped to produce it.

Editorial, Pages 20 on 09/25/2009

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