Der Fall Bill Cosby

I think this content is bound to rub many people the wrong way. The director admits that he has a viewpoint from the beginning.

If you are coming to this project to explore Cosby's "innocence" you won't find that here.

What you will find is a nicely paced docuseries that doesn't lie about Bill Cosby's impact to American & Black culture. Instead W. Kamal Bell decenters Bill Cosby the legend and recenters him as a real person while giving space for survivors to tell their stories.

This isn't a piece to simply bash someone who has done bad. It's deeper than that and worth the watch.

He may be free on a legal technicality, but as director W. Kamau Bell points out in this four-part documentary, his legacy cannot be simply ignored. Bell recognizes the need to re-examine Cosby's life and groundbreaking career through the lens of the comedian's self-admitted behavior as a narcissistic sexual predator. Not only does Bell have some of the survivors recount their unsavory encounters with Cosby, but he also secures others well-versed with his deep cultural impact and challenged by how to reconcile the two Cosbys that co-exist.

As Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" (2022 release; 4 episodes of about 58 min each) opens, various talking heads offer their view of what has become of Bill Cosby these days. "The juxtaposition is just bananas", offers one. That would be the understatement of the year. We then go back in time as Cosby makes his first appearance on the Jack Paar show in 1963, and his career takes off in no time. But a dark side also emerges soon...

Couple of comments: this TV mini-series documentary is written, produced and directed by comedian W. Kamau Bell, who readily admits to having idolized Cosby as a kid (and he's not the only one). Indeed, the juxtaposition of Cosby as America's dad and Cosby as the serial rapist is hard to stomach, but the evidence as to the latter is undeniable and overwhelming, just as is his track record as one of the greatest comedians in American history. The key moments in this series are when women provide in-depth, first hand accounts of what Cosby did to them: he drugged them, and then he raped them. And then they blamed themselves (a/k/a "victim blaming"). Cosby got away with it for DECADES. How many women did he sexually assault during that span? Hundreds? Thousands? (Please note that Cosby was found guilty of sexual assault in 2018. In June, 2021, he was released on a technicality. Still that makes him a convicted felon, and not just "alleged" as IMDb lists it here.) Bottom line: this mini-series is revelatory in many ways, presenting both sides of the person that is Bill Cosby. To which I kept thinking: "how does this guy sleep at night?"

Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" premiered in Showtime last Sunday, and new episodes are released on Sunday evenings. (If you have SHO On Demand and SHO Anytime, as I do, all episodes are already available.) If you have any interest in Bill Cosby or how he got away with what he did for all these years, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Like Kamau, I grew up with Cosby. I adored Fat Albert, I laughed until I couldn't breathe listening to his comedy albums. It is incredibly heart wrenching to discover what a terrible person he was. It's also truly horrifiying to confront how many people over the years helped him keep that secret. And it's awesome in the worst possible sense of the word to realize how one person can be two utterly different people, one who does tremendous good in the world and one who is a monster. Thank you, Kamau, for this amazing and heartbreaking retrospective!

He was definitely both, monumentally important to black lives in the 60s and beyond, and a real monster to individual women. Horrible human being with two faces.