Word: successful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Along with success came a rapid move toward political conservatism. In his Ames speech, as elsewhere, he produced a litany of what average voters have been saying to him. "They tell me they want the ultimate downfall of Soviet tyranny everywhere, including the Soviet Union," he declares. "They want to return to a time when husbands love their wives and wives love their husbands, a time when children can pray in school again...
Perhaps no performer in history has chronicled his life cycle so thoroughly, or so publicly, as Bill Cosby. Certainly no one has been so successful at it. Even Cosby, a man fond of outsize cigars and outlandish hyperbole, would have trouble overstating the scope of his popularity. As main attraction and chief architect of The Cosby Show, television's No. 1-rated program for three straight seasons, he dominates the medium as no star has since the days of Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. And he has parlayed his TV success into a multimedia empire that seems to grow like...
...season begins on NBC this week, has already earned a chapter in the TV history books. Its overall rating last season -- 34.9, representing 63 million viewers -- was not just its best in three seasons but the best for any TV series since Bonanza in 1964-65. The show's success has created its own bonanza on the syndication market: Cosby Show reruns, currently being sold to local stations, have earned a record-smashing $600 million, and the total could eventually top $1 billion; a third of that will go to Cosby himself. Meanwhile a Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World...
Clearly, Bill Cosby is more than a show-biz success story; he is a force in the national culture. Like Ronald Reagan, another entertainer with a warm, fatherly image who peaked relatively late in life, Cosby purveys a message of optimism and traditional family values. At a time when real-life families are weathering problems of drugs and divorce, the Huxtable clan on The Cosby Show is the very model of a strong, close-knit, parent-dominated unit. The fact that the family is black, without making a particular point of it, is an encouraging sign of maturity in matters...
...most puzzling question surrounding Cosby is why, after a long career that seemed to have plateaued somewhere short of superstardom, he suddenly found himself the proprietor of TV's biggest hit of the decade. By most objective standards, The Cosby Show is an unlikely candidate for through- the-roof success. In contrast, say, to the Norman Lear comedies of the early '70s, it breaks little new ground in style or subject matter. It has none of the gag-writing brio of The Mary Tyler Moore Show or a half a dozen comedies that followed it. Indeed, The Cosby Show might...