We Need to Talk About Cosby Review: A Firm, Convincing Case for Bill Cosby’s Guilt

We Need to Talk About Cosby makes a similarly convincing argument about Cosby’s artistic greatness and cultural significance.

We Need to Talk About Cosby
Photo: Mario Casilli/Showtime

Given the eroded nature of Bill Cosby’s public profile, the agonizing that W. Kamau Bell does in the opening narration of the surprisingly conversational We Need to Talk About Cosby might sound overwrought: “It scares me, but I feel like I have to have this discussion.” At the same time, what the docuseries does decently well over its well-paced, informative, and insightful four hours is show what lies behind Bell’s trepidation.

Many statues aren’t toppled easily, and the series firmly but convincingly advances the overwhelming case for Cosby’s guilt. We Need to Talk About Cosby makes a simultaneous and similarly convincing argument about his artistic greatness and racial and cultural significance. The tangle of the two causes the agita that courses through many of the interviews.

“I am a child of Bill Cosby. Raised by Fat Albert,” says Bell at one point. Many of the actors, writers, professors, and fellow comedians that Bell interviewed for the series express a similar relationship to the icon that they thought they knew. Their anxiety about coming to grips with Cosby’s crimes occupies a curious liminal space in which he’s less than an actual family member but more than just another celebrity. Structurally, We Need to Talk About Cosby is nothing much to speak of: Think CNN pop culture documentary. But the emotions behind it, revealed largely through Bell’s skillful and revealing interview style, feel raw and real.

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The first three episodes of the series examine in rapid-fire fashion the evolution of Cosby’s career and how he crafted the increasingly dad-like persona that bolstered his popularity and inadvertently deflected any questions or criticism of his indiscretions. A college dropout who hit the standup comedy scene in Philadelphia and then New York City in the early 1960s, Cosby seemed already a preternaturally confident and fully formed performer by the time he appeared on The Jack Paar Show in 1963. By editing racial content out of his act, Cosby cannily positioned himself as a crossover act at a time when Dick Gregory, the most notable Black comic at the time, was still viewed by white audiences as too political.

In 1965, Cosby’s role as a multilingual, Rhodes Scholar-educated secret agent on I Spy made him not just the country’s first Black TV star, but—as a cringe-inducing montage from Amos ‘n’ Andy shows—marked a quantum leap in terms of positive racial representation. We Need to Talk About Cosby pointedly notes that this was the same year of Cosby’s first reported rape.

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Starting in the ’70s, Cosby appeared to consciously pivot from what a newspaper once called “raceless” to what in the civil rights era was referred to as a “race man.” In addition to publicly embracing civil rights causes, he also became somewhat ubiquitous on television, fashioning himself a teacher of children in goofy programs like Picture Pages and even series like Fat Albert that promoted education, responsibility, and even racial uplift (as one of Bell’s interviewees notes, at the time very few Black students had ever had a non-white teacher). With the blockbuster success of his 1983 concert film Himself, The Cosby Show, and books about fatherhood in the ’80s, Cosby cemented his status as an upstanding symbol of Black success, which he would use in the following decade to moralize and harangue.

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A parallel track to Cosby’s career threads in interviews with numerous woman who describe in straightforward, harrowing detail their allegations of him drugging and raping them. All the while, he was still releasing comedy records, one of which included a routine about drugging women with Spanish Fly to get them aroused. “The motherfucker tells on himself!” critical studies academic Dr. Todd Boyd belts out almost in disbelief.

Bell doesn’t focus too much on such detective work in an attempt to suss out Cosby’s intentions. True to the nature of his previous work for CNN, he seems more wanting to have a conversation with people. This becomes more apparent as the series moves past pop-culture history and, especially in the final episode, into a discussion about how Cosby was able to victimize so many women with impunity for so many years. The collective answer presented here comes down to variations on a theme: Nobody wanted to know.

Intentionally or not, Cosby had created such an impregnable persona as family man, HBCU philanthropist, and comedic legend that many could not believe that he would cheat on his wife, Camille, much less be a rapist. That would have been like hearing “Barack was running around on Michelle,” muses The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, one of many younger interviewees who grew up on The Cosby Show. That disbelief feeds into the last episode’s exploration of the reluctance specifically in the Black community to hearing criticism of Cosby and how the dam didn’t start to crack until the 2014 viral comedy set by Hannibal Buress—spurred by his annoyance at Cosby’s hypocritical moralizing about the supposed defects of the Black community—and a 2015 Ebony cover story about The Cosby Show.

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The contrast between Cosby’s creative genius and criminal ignominy is still raw for many of the people Bell interviews, illustrating the length and chill of the shadow cast by Cosby’s iconic status. But at this point, others feel comfortable consigning the man to the past. Answering Bell’s question of “Who is Bill Cosby?” journalist Renee Graham answers with a succinctness that aptly deflates the subject: “A rapist who had a really big TV show once.”

Score: 
 Network: Showtime

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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