Word: dad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...pitch dark. Two young brothers who share a crowded bed are busily not going to sleep. As one of them, Bill Cosby, describes it years later in a classic monologue, the night is an extended comedy-drama of horseplay, taunting and hand-to-hand combat: "I'm tellin' Dad, I'm tellin' Dad . . ." "I never hit you, I never hit you . . ." Each outburst is followed by a visit from their father, who thunders like Zeus, "If I hear any more laughing . . . I'm going to KILL...
Flash forward. Cosby is the father now, presiding over a brood of five children on TV's top-rated series. When he arrives home in one episode, three of his daughters begin fawning over him. "What's blown up or on fire?" asks Dad skeptically. The youngest, it turns out, has cut photographs out of some of his favorite books to make a report for school. But Dad neither explodes nor affixes blame, just leafs resignedly through her handiwork. "Very good report," he comments. "Very expensive...
...birthday, prompting new thoughts -- and a new medium -- for America's most famous father. "I recently turned fifty," he writes at the outset of his book Time Flies, "which is young for a tree, mid-life for an elephant, and ancient for a quarter-miler, whose son now says, 'Dad I just can't run the quarter with you anymore unless I bring something to read...
...comes Cosby the publishing phenom. Three years ago Paul Bresnick, a senior editor at Doubleday and newly expectant father, came up with the idea for a book about being a dad. After his first two choices to write it were "thankfully not available," Bresnick approached Cosby, whose NBC series was just starting to take off. The result was Fatherhood, a collection of humorous anecdotes and observations, which spent more than a year on the best- seller list and sold 2.6 million hard-cover copies, edging past Iacocca to set a modern-day record. Naturally, that called for a sequel. Time...
...series stands well apart from most other current family shows, with their contrived plots and wisecracking tots. Parents on The Cosby Show are figures of calm authority, not boobs, and episodes revolve around the realistic trivia of everyday family life: Dad goes out to buy a new car, or a daughter tries to explain her bad grades. Such plots, of course, are simply a throwback to slice-of-family-life shows of the '50s and '60s like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver, and Cosby's success may partly reflect nostalgia for those simpler old times...