Exclusive Showtime Docuseries Continues Through Black History Month
Bill Cosby was a role model for comics like W. Kamau Bell, who produced and directed the docuseries, showing that you could be smart and funny in equal measure. In We Need to Talk About Cosby, he asks the question: “How do we talk about Bill Cosby? Here’s all the good he did and all the other things that I and many other people believe he did.”
NPR’s television critic Eric Deggans interviewed Bell for the NPR Storytelling Lodge at this year’s virtual Sundance Film Festival. During that interview, Deggans asked why he made a film with pundits, comics, assault survivors, experts and more speaking on Cosby’s legacy.
A big part of the reason, as Bell has told in other outlets, was that few people wanted to speak about Cosby on tape, for a variety of reasons.
Kamau referenced a segment in the docuseries about Black stunt performers. It begins with Black actress and model Gloria Hendry, who appeared in the James Bond film Live And Let Die, saying there were no Black stuntwomen to film a scene where Bond fights her. Instead, a white man dressed in a white sleeveless outfit with his skin colored black, served as the stunt double.
Bell tells how Cosby on the set of I Spy, his very first TV show, told the producers he would not work on the show unless they got him a Black stunt performer after watching a white stuntman getting painted black. Bell said that changed the whole industry.
Reportedly, when Bell heard a documentary on Black stuntmen pulled a Cosby interview, he worried the rush to not talk about the comic would also eliminate important information. In Bell’s estimation, if something wasn’t done to reckon with the two sides of Cosby — the side of him known as America’s Dad and the other, a serial rapist, critical Black history could be lost if mishandled.
A spokesperson for Cosby released a statement earlier this week calling Bell’s project a “PR hack,” noting the superstar comedian has denied all allegations of drugging and assault and claiming, “despite media’s repetitive reports of allegations against Mr. Cosby, none have ever been proven in any court of law.” Cosby was found guilty on three counts of assault in 2018 and served almost three years in prison before the conviction was overturned on appeal.
The docuseries features stories from several women who say Cosby drugged and raped them, using a timeline to compare dates of the assaults to important milestones in the comic’s career. Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy model, told Bell that Cosby assaulted her in 1969. This was years before Bell was born.
Bell doesn’t ask Cosby for comment. He deliberately chose this course of action in order to make this docuseries a conversation about Cosby, rather than with him, and did so in part out of concern for the survivors.
“Once you get the buy-in from some of the survivors to do something that is very delicate — we’re going to tell your story,” Bell said. “But there’s also going to be stuff in here that is about the good parts of Bill Cosby’s legacy — to get them to buy into that part is big. It would feel like a total betrayal to then go, also, we reached out to Bill Cosby, and we’re going to interview him.”
Deggans notes that what Bell’s work does differently than documentaries like Surviving R. Kelly and Framing Britney Spears is it asks audiences to reexamine how we all may have shrugged off past controversies. Bell is after something different.
“The commonality is not listening to women,” Bell said. “The thing that we all need to do, and specifically as men, is we have to do a better job of prioritizing, centering and platforming the voices of women, especially brothers like me and you who are in positions of power and privilege.”
I would go so far as to argue that Bell is also after a reconciling of the two sides of Bill Cosby — the side that advanced civil rights in film and television, the side that championed historically Black colleges and universities; a trailblazer for actors and comedians who followed him — with the side that sexually assaulted scores of women over the 50 year span of his career; the side of Cosby, whose power and prestige silenced many of his victims. In other words, exacting accountability doesn’t have to mean the erasure of the good and the admirable in Cosby. But it does mean there has to be accountability no matter what.
In the old media landscape, traditional network television dominated and Americans with a television in their household organized their time around their favored, shows. For better or for worse, the old media landscape allowed for a collective experience of ground-shaking events. We Need to Talk About Cosby is airing only on Showtime with no plans of it being aired on Netflix or any other platform without a Showtime subscription for the foreseeable future.
Subscriptions are available for purchase through Apple, Roku, Amazon, your cable provider or the Showtime website. The four-episode docuseries began airing on Jan. 30. The second episode airs on Feb. 6.