The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized

The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized

The opening credits of The Cosby Show feature each cast member dancing to a funky popular beat. The colorful and kinetic opening seems designed to flow very well into slickly produced high budget prime time commercials. The opening reminded me of some of the peppier Pepsi Cola commercials that aired during the program.

The main plot of the episode I watched revolved around the fact that Elvin, Dr. Huxtabul’s son, and his wife were moving into their first private home. This was an occasion for many members of the family to get together for the house warming party. Elvin’s grandfather among others was present at the house warming party. Several times during the course of the episode family was held forth as a valued ideal.

A subplot was constructed around the expected marriage announcement of Vanessa, Dr. Huxtabul’s daughter, and her fiancee Dabnes. The grandfather had passed on the rumor that Vanessa and Dabnes would announce they were getting married at the house warming party. To the surprise of the Huxtabuls, Vanessa and Dabnes declare that they intend to separate.

Family is central to the stress that Mr. Huxtabul and Dabnes experience regarding their parting. Engaged to Vanessa Dabnes had become a valued member of the “extended family”. In the end Mr. Huxtabul and Dabnes agree that they will still be friends, but that the family ties are no longer the same.

Over the years the network situation comedy has developed its own peculiar conventions. Henry Louis Gates in his article TV’s Black World Turns - But Stays Unreal argues that the genre is necessarily limited not only by its own conventions but also by other factors, which in turn shape those conventions. The Cosby Show exemplifies the empty gestures of tokenism, pabulum sanitized to satisfy profit driven network executives who dare not portray social realism during prime time, lest the Nielsen ratings fall and the sponsors withdraw.

The Cosby Show portrays a relatively large and extraordinarily cohesive upper middle class family. Both of these portrayals are well established conventions of the genre. These conventions reflect values that are popularly held to be ideal not only by the African-American community, but by the majority culture as well. By choosing to emphasize these themes the program articulates a consensus of cultural values; these values represent a consensus of values held by the mainstreams of both majority and minority cultures. For example, the plot of the show I analyzed revolved around a house warming party. At the house warming party several generations of the Huxtable family were to gather in order to foster a sense of family continuity and cohesion. Cliff Huxtable, his father and his son were central characters in the story, presenting a patrilinear view of family continuity that is representative of the dominant cultural ideology.

The Cosby Show implicates individual viewers in the culture’s values through the very situations it portrays. Taking Dr. Huxtable as an example we have a character whose profession is that of physician, a profession viewed as noble and old money by both majority and minority cultures. The Huxtable family is presented as thriving in the brownstone neighborhood, ensconced as it is in immaculate landscaping, of Brooklyn Heights. The plot of many episodes revolves around tension between the articulated consensus values and the encroaching influences of socially undesirable phenomena such as alcohol use or pre-marital sex. These tensions of the society are noticed by, and produce confusion in, many of us. By implicating one in this conflict between core values and moral decline the viewer’s consciousness easily flows into the conflicting messages of commercials that play to core values on the one hand, and to moral decline on the other.

In The Cosby Show viewers have a celebration and a justification of their culture. This show in particular has as its star a celebrity; that is, a person celebrated. During the episodes flashy high budget commercials are commonplace, further contributing to the air of celebration surrounding the ritual of prime time television viewing. Returning to the house warming party we see a depiction of a celebration of the recent acquisition of property by Cliff Huxtable’s son in law. The House warming party depiction should serve to comfort viewers, and to reinforce the mainstream faith in the bootstrap capitalist fantasy analyzed by Henry Louis Gates in TV’s Black World Turns - But Stays Unreal. From their bleak and tangled lives the very victims of the reactionary turn taken by American politics, insofar as affirmative action is concerned, look in through the television looking glass on to the reassuring illusions of The Cosby Show.

The Cosby Show assures viewers of the importance of their beliefs through each episodes successful resolution of the situations that drive the comedy. The successfully achieving and acquiring family presented in the show will naturally reinforce the idealization of the core value “family” held by the dominant cultural ideology. The viewer, who has already been implicated in the cultures core values, sees again and again the successes of a strong and solid family. The Huxtable family also happens to be African-American, further extending the audience to whom reassurance is conveyed. Tragically viewers from the majority culture may hold forth the situation portrayed by the program as their hypothetical foil for the advocate of affirmative action, characterized by remarks to the effect, “if only they would pull themselves up by the bootstraps like the Huxtables everything would be fine.”

Reactionary ignorance of the historical roots of minority disenfranchisement thrives on the comfort and reassurance given to the masses via the idiot box. This comfort and reassurance goes far in the way of convincing the viewers of their status as individuals. Both the disenfranchised African-American viewer and an affluent viewer of the majority culture are comforted and reassured in paradoxically divergent ways by a show such as Cosby’s. The disenfranchised African-American may feel that Cosby is indicative of their own potential for success if only they apply themselves with diligence to that end; the mirror image of this consideration is illustrated by the reassurance of the reactionary viewer as to the validity of their social ideology.

A sense of belonging to the culture, at the cost of attaining a mainstream bourgeoisie lifestyle, is transmitted to the African-American community. However, viewers of the majority culture may also feel a sense of belonging as they are comforted by the fantasies presented to them by the television networks. The very fact that a large portion of the consumers to whom commercials are intended to sell products are people who sorely need comfort and reassurance seems to preclude any move by network executives toward greater social realism on prime time television.

The networks use of an easily identifiable celebrity such as Cosby is yet another indication of the need of a commercial medium to grab the public’s attention with the public figures most readily apprehensible by all. Cosby himself frequently appears in commercials; the viewer’s identification of situation comedy and commercial with one another becomes closer than ever. In its turn the profit driven bias of prime time network television crystallizes, further reinforcing the tendency of network executives to dish up pabulum like Cosby. As long as network executives remain caught in the cycle of celebrity and profit there is little hope that The Cosby Show will amount to anything more than a cynical token gesture on their part.