Watching We Need to Talk about Cosby

My wife, Monika, and I just finished the second episode of We Need to Talk about Cosby. This episode looks at the life and work of Bill Cosby in the 1970s and early 1980s and stops just before he begins the Cosby Show. The episode focuses on two things:

First, it shows how hard Cosby worked in the seventies and how much he accomplished. These accomplishments included:

• acting in several movies (Mother, Jugs and Speed, The Devil and Max Devlin, Uptown Saturday Night). None of them were all that financially successful.
• Starting three separate short-lived television shows, not including,
• Creating the truly groundbreaking television show Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,
• earning a doctorate (Ed.D) -- some claim he did not really attend classes and it is also alleged he did not write his own dissertation,
• Starring in his own comedy movie: Bill Cosby, Himself.

Second, the episode includes interviews with multiple women who claim, with considerable detail, that Cosby drugged and raped them. Multiple women. The episode also includes interviews with a sex therapist, a trauma therapist, a drug expert, and other professionals who explain, in detail, the nature of sexual predators and how they are often charming people who you would never expect to be able to take advantage of and rape people.

Now what makes We Need To Talk about Cosby, and this episode, in particular, such compelling work is that it asks you to consider that both things can be true at the same time. Bill Cosby worked hard and got better and better as a comic and creator; he had a huge impact on television and children's televison and on comedy. And Bill Cosby, during the same period of time was a serial abuser who sexually assaulted many many women. As uncomfortable as the thought my be, Bill Cosby worked very hard at both his career and at finding and abusing young women at the same time.