The New Bill Cosby Documentary Is A Blueprint For Public Reckonings

This schism is the engine of the series. To explore it meaningfully, Bell deploys a simple tool in a powerful manner: As he methodically charts the rise of Cosby as a clean comedian and bankable action star, all the way to the most powerful face on American television, an elegant timeline slots in the accusations Cosby faces during each phase of his career.

The effect is immediately devastating. The timeline dispels the notion that Cosby’s career highs were somehow a separate era from the intentional evil. The earliest story comes quite soon into Cosby’s rise, and from there, as Bell painstakingly chronicles Cosby’s growing influence, he carefully sews in the stories of Cosby’s accusers onto the chronological map.

Juxtaposing the two makes for an unsettling watch. In the first episode, Bell sheds light on Cosby’s powerful protest against using white stuntpeople in blackface, and how it directly opened the door for Black stunt performers. It’s a little-told story of how Cosby’s stance quite literally created an industry for Black people where none existed. But the act is quickly contrasted with one of the most harrowing tales of assault, which comes from Victoria Valentino.

In startling detail, Valentino tells the story of meeting Bill Cosby in 1969 shortly after her young son drowned. She says the comedian offered her and her friend pills, and under the pretense of driving them home brought them to a townhouse. Here, Bell’s camera is unflinching as Valentino recalls what Cosby did after drugging her: First, she says, he tried to rape her friend, and when she interrupted him, he raped her instead.

Then the examples pour in: Cosby was allegedly drugging women while making radical educational television like 1978’s Picture Pages; he was doing it while redefining stand-up comedy; he was doing it while he was starring in and running one of the most successful shows in the history of American television. Bell’s timeline serves to merge the two separate images of Cosby into one.

Beyond tracing these contradictory ideas, Bell excavates Cosby’s career to show what we had missed all along. When the talking heads react to footage of Cosby delivering his infamous “Spanish fly” routine, about spiking women’s drinks, we learn that he first told the bit in the 1960s and was still telling it in the ’90s (“Cosby, from almost day one, was telling us that he was willing to — and didn’t think anything was strange about — putting things in women’s drinks,” reacts academic Marc Lamont Hill).

Bell also plays his interview subjects a clip of The Cosby Show where Dr. Huxtable deviously explains how people “get all huggy-buggy” after eating his homemade barbecue sauce. Bell is in effect asking us to consider that perhaps Cosby has been giving us glimpses into who he has always been all along. It unsettles the notion that the Cosby story is some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tension. The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb drives home the point: “You could make the case that it was all Mr. Hyde.”