Bill Cosby Returning to NBC and Reteaming with 'The Cosby Show' Producer For New Family Sitcom

focus · January 2014

Bill Cosby Reteaming With NBC for New Family Comedy
10:24 AM PST 1/22/2014 by Lesley Goldberg

Cosby is teaming with former Cosby Show producer Tom Werner of Carsey Werner for a new family comedy in which he'd star, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Returning to prime time next fall, the new comedy will be centered around Cosby, who will play the patriarch of a multigenerational family, like NBC's Cosby Show, and will include his take on marriage and parenting. A search is underway for writers on the project, which is being eyed for development outside of the traditional pilot season window.

The news comes two months after Cosby told Yahoo TV that he was interested in returning to TV for another family show.

"I want to be able to deliver a wonderful show to [a] network," Cosby said, "because there is a viewership out there that wants to see comedy, and warmth, and love, and surprise, and cleverness, without going into the party attitude. They would like to see a married couple that acts like they love each other, warts and all, children who respect the parenting, and the comedy of people who make mistakes. Warmth and forgiveness. So I hope to get that opportunity, and I will deliver the best of Cosby, and that will be a series, I assume, that we could get enough people week after week after week to tune in to, to come along with us."

The project comes as NBC's comedy fare has continued to struggle. The network returned only two half-hours from the 2012-13 season -- Parks and Recreation and Community. Its current freshman class, which includes the straight-to-series The Michael J. Fox Show, has struggled. NBC entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt told reporters Sunday at the Television Critics Association's winter press tour that the network's comedy block has "been a real challenge," and may shuffle the whole deck when it comes to its Must See TV Thursday lineup that once included The Cosby Show and Family Ties.

But Bill Cosby is not Michael J. Fox, even if, like Michael J. Fox, Cosby’s last two TV ventures—1993’s The Cosby Mysteries and 1996’s Cosby, the latter of which even reunited him with Phylicia Rashad—left nary a dent on popular culture. (And yet, in its first season Cosby had 16 million viewers; in its last, 8 million. Either number would be a sizable hit for NBC right now.) Cosby is not just an actor, he’s the creative force behind his series. (And, all due respect to Family Ties, it is no Cosby Show, which has aged beautifully and still makes me laugh.) Unlike Michael J. Fox, Cosby is not relying on someone else to assemble a decent show for him, he’s going to go out and make himself a show—and television could really use a Bill Cosby show right now.

The Cosby Show, about a large, affluent African-American family living in brownstone Brooklyn, was notoriously uncontroversial (though Cosby himself is far from apolitical). Still, its characters took great pride in being African-American—and in being extremely successful African-Americans at that. In contrast to the Norman Lear shows of the ’70s (Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons), which addressed social issues overtly, the racial dynamics of The Cosby Show were usually there as subtext. But that subtext was plain to see to those members of the audience who wanted to see it. This subtlety helped make The Cosby Show a huge hit—it appealed to everyone—which in turn made the ’80s and ’90s a boom time for black sitcoms. (Nothing makes networks “brave” like success.) When The Cosby Show ended its run, The Fresh Prince, Family Matters, A Different World, Roc, Hanging With Mr. Cooper, Living Single, and Martin were all on the air.

By the mid to late-’90s, though, black sitcoms had largely moved to fledgling networks the UPN and WB, where shows like Moesha, Girlfriends, Everybody Hates Chris, and Sister Sister aired. The Bernie Mac show aired on Fox for five years in the early aughts, but it was a rarity. There are currently no sitcoms on the major networks (i.e., not including BET and Tyler Perry’s work for TBS) that are primarily about black characters, even if there are more sitcoms than ever that contain at least one or two characters of color. (You can read Todd VanDerWerff’s piece explaining why and how this happened, but basically: Networks started to cater to advertisers who started to cater almost exclusively to affluent white people.) Twenty-two years after he left television, Bill Cosby remains one of the few people who can get a black family show on a network again.

Cosby’s recent stand-up material suggests that he is now positioned to be just as funny as a grandfather as he was as a dad. He seems to have been buffing the character of the slightly-doddering, cutting-in-flashes, exasperating and exasperated husband and grandpa for quite some time. On Letterman last week he did a bit that would have been much better on a sitcom than it was as a joke: He told story about how he went to buy a piñata, said “Buenos Dias” to the woman at the store, was regaled with reams of Spanish he didn’t understand, and was reduced to answering her with “Feliz Navidad.” He has also been particularly focused on the commanding nature of wives. The nagging woman is one of sitcommery’s oldest, and most exhausted, tropes, but given that Cliff and Clair Huxtable were a high-water mark for solid and sexy long-term TV marriages, perhaps some of Cosby’s bits about being henpecked will get more balanced when the henpecker gets screen time of her own. Certainly, geriatric romance is wide open territory, and it’s hard to think of anyone better to explore it than Bill Cosby.

They might as well bring back all the original folks and do it Modern Family style where you are following different pockets of an extended family at different times who come together often. Everybody is still around and not really doing much. They'd probably never get "Denise"/Lisa Bonet to come back, but you could have an adult Raven Simone basically fill her spot. Basically the kids now as adults with their own families.