I 'm going out with the graduating class of 2000", said Bill Cosby last week, announcing the canning of The Cosby Show. "I wish I could have done better for CBS." It's a downbeat signing-off for America's No 1 dad, Dr Cliff Huxtable, part of the troika of highest paid black entertainers in America: Oprah, Michael Jackson, and Bill.
Cosby joined CBS in 1995, three years after leaving NBC, home of The Cosby Show for the whole of the 1980s - the decade Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates called "The Cosby Decade" for the simple reason that The Cosby Show rearranged the landscape. American TV had seen nothing like it.
At least, not since I Love Lucy, a show to which Cosby was hugely indebted. At its inception, however, Cosby sought to create the opposite. "(I wish to show) African-Americans acting like human beings - I want people to look at this show and say, 'Hey, how did they get cameras in my house?'"
But Cosby did nothing of the sort. Instead, he created an ultra-smooth, ultra-aspirational portrait of the perfect American family. The banter between Cosby and his family was pure Lucy, with Cosby playing the role Lucille Ball had forged: kooky, loving, the linchpin of the family; continually reined in by his partner - ie, told off for stashing the cookies - but ultimately at the centre of, and totally in control of his middle-class world.
The popularity of the show in the 1980s coincided with a moment in black America analogous to the height of I Love Lucy in the 60s. Both came just before a bubble burst. For apple-pie white America, it was Vietnam and civil rights. For the emergent black middle-class aspiring to Cosby prosperity in the 80s, it was the rebirth of race politics via the LA riots, Marion Barry's Washington crack revelations and the end of colour-blind social aspiration.
In the 90s, America reconfigured itself. Denzel Washington could play Malcolm X in a slick Hollywood blockbuster and Tarantino could call everyone "nigga". Both were cool. Cosby mugging to camera wasn't.
At the end of the decade, the uneasy stand-off between Cosby, The Man and Dr Cliff Huxtable came to an end with the death of his 28-year-old son, Ennis, in a drive-by shooting. Ennis had overcome dyslexia to gain a doctorate from Columbia University, and was planning to set up a school for children with learning difficulties. His upbringing bore an uncanny resemblance to Theo Huxtable's in the Cosby Show; his real-life success, a self-fulfilling prophecy borne of the fictional son.
Here was the real end of the Cosby Show, not last week's downbeat announcement. TV sitcom had crossed American gun law, with the most depressing conclusion imaginable. Cosby couldn't sustain the charade any more. His heart wasn't in it.
To condemn the series as glossy make-believe is to seriously misunderstand the significance of The Cosby Show. By 1992, the show had won six Emmys and 14 Image awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Cosby had fought numerous battles with the network, including threatening to take the show off air when NBC objected to an anti-apartheid poster in one of the bedrooms.
Accusing Cosby of political cop-out was a favourite game of predominantly white liberal journalists in the 90s. A more accurate reading of his stance would be to acknowledge that Cosby played the very long game. Unlike Michael Ovitz or Jerry Katzenberg, Cosby (and Oprah) reached a level of unparalleled power within the American entertainment industry after decades of hard slog at the coalface of commercial TV.
They moved into the boardroom only after becoming stars. Here is where the real focus of institutional racism in the American entertainment industry lies. Neither could have attained power-broker status without a supreme ability to play a frustrating balancing act throughout their long on-screen careers.
For Cosby, this may have explained his refusal to accommodate change within the show. Cosby did nothing to upset the cart. Ultimately, the man was looking to become a real role model, rather than a fictional one. And the pay-off for off-screen power was always going to be on-screen compromise.
Compare the rise of Cosby in the 80s with the rise of Roseanne. A sit-com that, in many ways, fulfilled Cosby's original aim to show a mirror to the audience, warts and all.
Roseanne was ostensibly far more radical than The Cosby Show, hitting the network where it hurt by portraying the most advertiser-unfriendly family in the history of American sitcom (attitudes soon changed when the show was pulling in audiences of more than 15 million). Like Cosby, Roseanne found it increasingly difficult to sustain the blur between character and reality. And for all Roseanne's claims to blue-collar credibility, race (and racism) was as conspicuously absent as it was in Cosby.
Perhaps history will read the two shows as companion pieces. Roseanne may have struck a chord with ordinary white (and a surprisingly large proportion of black) families, but Cosby represented some platonic ideal of assimilation. And in America, there is no higher thing to aspire to than a patent lie.
