My son looks at me hopefully and asks, "Dad, when are we going to watch another Cosby Show?"
My daughter grimaces and tells him we won't be watching it anymore. Unlike him, she's old enough to understand why our marathon viewing of The Cosby Show has come to an end, even if, thankfully, she's not yet old enough to fully comprehend the sheer horror of the acts in question.
And I shake my head and wish I'd never introduced them to the show in the first place.
If you want to avoid the work of an artist whose personal activities and views you find questionable, that's your prerogative, and everyone draws that line in a different place. You might view Mel Gibson as an anti-Semite, racist, and misogynist and still have to stop channel surfing whenever you land on the torture scene from Lethal Weapon; or you might hold your nose about the various scandals and accusations in Woody Allen's past when you watch his latest film; or shrug off memories of Alec Baldwin's last six public tantrums because you really want to see the 30 Rock where Jack role-plays as Tracy's dad. Saints are rare in any profession, let alone the entertainment industry, and chances are you adore the work of someone whose presence you wouldn't tolerate if you spent an hour getting to know them as a person.
With Bill Cosby, though, there's no easy way to separate the art from the artist. The preponderance of testimony against him is horrifying, painting him as a serial predator of women on a level that can't be rationalized away. And Cosby and Cliff Huxtable are as intertwined as any actor and character in TV history—including the ones like Ozzie Nelson and Jerry Seinfeld, who, like Cosby, more or less played themselves.
Cosby and his alter ego had different names, professions, and levels of income and fame, but in all ways that mattered to the audience, Cosby was Cliff and vice versa. They had the same number of kids with the same gender breakdown. Theo in particular behaved exactly like how Cosby had described his son, Ennis, in his comedy act, and in many episodes, The Cosby Show simply felt like a dramatization of the Bill Cosby: Himself stand-up concert. They had the same cultural interests, the same attitudes about parenting, and the same desire to lecture others about both. This was a sitcom-as-lifestyle-manual, and the only difference at times between the show and some of Cosby's own jeremiads against the state of black America was that the show had a lot of great jokes surrounding the harangues.
Because Bill and Cliff were one and the same, and because the show was so clearly bent on educating as well as entertaining, there's no way to watch a second of it now without flinching at thoughts of what Cosby allegedly did to all those women, and at the unmitigated hypocrisy of the whole enterprise.
