Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.
I don’t want to say “R.I.P.” anymore whenever someone I admire passes.
Okay, maybe I will say “R.I.P.” again somewhere. I want to say it less often. I’m just tired of seeing that phrase. “R.I.P.” also stands for “Rest in power,” a phrase that originated in Bay Area hip-hop culture. According to etymologist Barry Popik, one of the earliest instances of “Rest in power” in public was the Bay Area graffiti community’s acknowledgement of the armed robbery death of Filipino American graffiti artist Mike “Dream” Francisco in Oakland in 2000. Black people started using the phrase to honor the deaths of hip-hop artists or victims of police violence, and then the trans community adopted it to mourn trans people who died.
“However, as time goes on, the words have begun to lose some of their connections to their activist roots,” wrote Mother Jones writer Arianna Coghill in “People Are Telling the Queen to ‘Rest in Power.’ Let’s Not Do That,” a 2022 piece for the magazine. “Now, everyone gets to rest in power. Musician Eddie Money—rest in power. Barbara Bush—rest in power. [Queen Elizabeth II] is just the latest white, wealthy, and powerful honoree. ‘Rest in power’ has been transformed from a rallying cry of the oppressed to a trendy Twitter slogan that anyone can slap onto a half-assed micro-eulogy.”
Whenever I see someone in this site’s comments sections or on Bluesky say “R.I.P.,” it makes me think of the current misuse of “Rest in power,” and I get pissed off all over again. “Rest in power” is yet another item on the list of millions of things white people fucking ruined. As for “Rest in peace,” I prefer the phrase “[Place name here] is swirling in the heavens” over “Rest in peace to [place name here].”
Malcolm-Jamal Warner is swirling in the heavens.
Warner, who drowned while trying to save his eight-year-old daughter from a riptide in Costa Rica, was the epitome of the reliable journeyman actor. We Filipino Americans have someone similar to Warner: Dante Basco. Like Warner, Basco had one terrific role when he was a child actor (Rufio in Hook), and though he never became a movie star or the lead on multiple hit shows, he continues to act in projects that range from highly enjoyable (Blood and Bone) to disappointing except for the interesting storyline about Bay Area cockfighting (I wanted the 2021 indie rom-com The Fabulous Filipino Brothers, which Basco directed and starred in with all of his actor brothers, to be better than how it turned out).
Every time I see Basco or hear his distinctive voice in an animated project (I’ve never seen A Goofy Movie, where one line of his as a really minor character is one of the most quoted lines from the movie), it’s never a dull moment. I felt the same way about Warner.
Warner went from a breakout role on The Cosby Show as Theo, Dr. Cliff Huxtable’s only son in an upscale Brooklyn Heights household where Theo and Cliff are surrounded by women and girls, to directing music videos (like the one for Special Ed’s “I’m the Magnificent”) and alternating between hour-long dramas—he was a regular in five of The Resident’s six seasons, where he had a supporting role as “The Raptor,” a brash and arrogant cardiothoracic surgeon and a character he considered to be his favorite—and, of course, sitcoms. He was considered by The Avocado’s Liamgoncet to be a standout as a sports talk personality on Listen Up—a short-lived Jason Alexander vehicle that was based on the life of Pardon the Interruption co-host Tony Kornheiser and was the subject of both an Avocado Television Turmoil piece by Liamgoncet and a cleverly edited Joe Ramoni “Seinfeld Curse Files” essay—and he later recurred on Community.
When Warner joined the cast of Community to play Andre, Shirley’s off-and-on husband, the NBC cult-favorite sitcom was airing in the Thursday 8pm time slot The Cosby Show used to occupy on NBC, so it felt like Warner was returning home. During his first appearance on Community, the writers couldn’t help slipping in a sight gag about the sitcom that made him famous.
In honor of Warner’s passing, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the first-season main title theme from Jeremiah, the 2002-04 J. Michael Straczynski show where Warner starred as Kurdy Malloy, a survivor of the Big Death, a pandemic that killed everyone who was older than 13 in 2006. Both Kurdy and Luke Perry’s titular hero attempt to rebuild in 2021 a post-apocalyptic world riddled with gangs led by villainous guest stars like, in one of my favorite first-season episodes, Perry’s old Beverly Hills, 90210 co-star Jason Priestley—as well as stop a second pandemic from being unleashed by a group of middle-aged men who somehow survived the Big Death and want to create authoritarian rule.
Jeremiah’s main title theme was composed by Tim Truman, whose most famous instrumental is the Melrose Place theme.
Warner’s death spurred me to watch Jeremiah for the first time on Prime Video. I never got into Straczynski’s Babylon 5. I only know Straczynski from the Amazing Spider-Man issues he wrote and his work on The Real Ghostbusters, which went into a creative rut after his departure. One of my favorite experiences on Twitter—long before I deleted my account over there—was when I posted a photo of some of the most asinine notes Straczynski received from a marketing consulting firm that was hired by ABC to fix The Real Ghostbusters, and I was quote-tweeted by Straczynski himself, who blasted the firm’s “blatant misogyny.”
Even though Straczynski was miserable when he worked on Jeremiah (which he adapted from a Belgian comic book) because he regularly fought with MGM studio execs (Jeremiah was an MGM Television production for Showtime), he recently said on Bluesky that on Jeremiah, “we still managed to tell some good stories.” He encouraged fans of his who skipped Jeremiah to give it a whirl on Prime. (It’s also streamable on the Roku Channel.)
Straczynski is right that there was some good storytelling on Jeremiah. It’s an easier show to get into than Babylon 5. In 2025, the sight of Warner and Perry mowing down white supremacists and fascists satisfies my bloodlust for seeing Nazis and right-wingers die horrible deaths. The relaxed buddy-movie chemistry that immediately developed between Warner and Perry in the two-hour series premiere is another huge asset to Jeremiah.
“You can see that Luke and I like each other as well as what we do and I think that vibe filters right down to the rest of the cast and crew,” said Warner to interviewer Steve Eramo during the filming of Jeremiah’s second season in Vancouver. “The very first phone conversation Luke and I had prior to coming up to Canada was about the fact that he and I have been doing this [acting] for a long time. We’ve both dealt with the politics, the bullshit, the egos, etc. We decided to make Jeremiah about the work, but also make sure we had a good time doing it. That’s been our focus from the onset and I think it’s worked out well.”
On Jeremiah, Warner made one of the smoothest transitions from sitcom veteran to hard-bitten (but ultimately kind-hearted) action hero. Though Jeremiah lasted for only two seasons, Warner’s experiences of working on that hour-long cable drama were more like his pleasant experiences on The Cosby Show (the tensions between the writing staff and Bill Cosby were a different story) and less like his run on Malcolm & Eddie, a tumultuous part of Warner’s otherwise drama-free and uncontroversial life.
Warner got into arguments with Eddie Griffin over their different approaches to comedy and Griffin’s lateness to the set. (“Eddie is a nut,” said Warner, who got along better with Griffin long after Malcolm & Eddie’s cancellation, on Toure Show in 2023.) He also found himself at war with the Malcolm & Eddie writing staff and UPN, the network that was derisively referred to by many in the Black community as “the United Plantation Network.”
“[Malcolm & Eddie] was a hard show for me to do,” said Warner to interviewer Lola Ogunnaike on PeopleTV’s Couch Surfing in 2018. “It was a hard time for me because I had come from a history-making show that showed that people of color could be funny without being stereotypical, and once we went off the air and I went over to work for UPN, their whole marketing campaign and their whole programming was [sic] really the antithesis of what we were doing on Cosby.”
Warner’s work on The Cosby Show is mostly why I feel like somebody I knew because he was a junior-high friend of my older brother’s—as well as the only male kid from my brother’s junior-high circle of jerky or pretentious friends I got along with—has just died.
I regularly watched The Cosby Show when it first aired on NBC. It was such a behemoth that initially unpopular sitcoms like Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court became hit shows because of their vicinity to The Cosby Show on NBC’s Thursday night schedule. The episodes about little Rudy’s dead goldfish (“Goodbye, Mr. Fish” was only the second episode), Rudy’s inability to resist playing with the Huxtable kitchen’s new juicer, Theo’s wish to become a male model, Theo’s boredom with Shakespeare, and Stevie Wonder’s recording session with the Huxtable kids were all episodes I saw when they were new.
One of my favorite passages in Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, the Roots co-founder/drummer’s 2013 memoir, is Questlove’s memory of watching for the first time Theo’s interaction with one of Wonder’s musical instruments in “A Touch of Wonder.”
“Why do I say that this episode changed hip-hop forever? Simple: it was the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was,” wrote Questlove. “At one point Theo says ‘jammin’ on the one,’ and before you knew it, Stevie Wonder had sampled it and inserted it into a song. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this episode was the incident that truly sucked me into hip-hop production. It was the first time I saw anything like that, and I’ve surveyed the rest. It was the first time J Dilla saw a sampler. It was the first time Just Blaze saw a sampler.”
But the most memorable Cosby Show episode was definitely 1984’s “A Shirt Story,” which was written by John Markus (one of the show’s most prolific writers and later the third in a line of Cosby Show showrunners that began with Taxi veteran Earl Pomerantz) and was the tale of Theo’s attempt to work around his dad’s refusal to allow him to buy an expensive designer shirt to impress a girl he likes. The shirt Theo longs for was made by the fictional high-end clothing company Gordon Gartrelle (named after a Cosby Show crew member who later wrote for the show).
Denise, the second oldest Huxtable daughter, volunteers to sew for Theo a knockoff of the Gordon Gartrelle shirt. The result was Black Twitter’s favorite sartorial monstrosity.
“Those kids felt like real kids,” said Higher Learning podcast co-host Van Lathan to Bomani Jones when they discussed The Cosby Show and Warner’s death last week on The Right Time with Bomani Jones. “They didn’t have answers. They weren’t doing ridiculously stupid things like in the movie WarGames, where you almost start a thermonuclear war. They were doing real-world stupid kid things. They wrote them like they were kids, like, ‘I’m going to a concert I shouldn’t have gone to, and the concert goes crazy.’ Like, ‘I want an expensive shirt. I buy the shirt. The shirt is too much money. I gotta take it back. Now my sister makes the shirt. The shirt looks crazy.’ They wrote them like they were kids. They didn’t give them too much. They gave them just enough for it to be really believable, and then Cliff and Clair were there to remind the world that it’s their job to take these people and make real-world citizens out of them, and it was very effective.”
I liked The Cosby Show when I was a kid who was doing lots of real-world stupid kid things just like Theo, Denise, Rudy, and Vanessa did. As an adult, I have mixed feelings about the show—ever since I had Herman Gray, the author of 1995’s Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness, as a teacher at UC Santa Cruz. Gray preferred Frank’s Place, Tim Reid and series creator Hugh Wilson’s late ’80s single-camera comedy about tensions between working-class Black folks and affluent Black businessmen in the world of New Orleans restaurants and funeral parlors, over the feel-good utopia of The Cosby Show. In Marlon Riggs’s 1992 documentary Color Adjustment, Gray opened my eyes to the limitations of The Cosby Show’s emphasis on an upper-middle-class Black family.
“The Reagan ideology was predominantly that if you’d open up access to corporations to make money, then the opportunity structure opens up. Well, we see that didn’t happen,” said Gray during Color Adjustment’s segment about whether or not the Huxtables’ affluence is a positive image. “We’ve got this incredible polarization of rich and poor. And Black people converged around the poverty end of that. And I think that, to have then a show that mediates between that polarization, we come away with the sense in which, ‘Well, the society’s fine. I mean there’s no problem. You just have to work hard. You just have to have the right values, have the right kinds of desires and aspirations, and it’ll be alright.’ ”
The Cosby Show was awash with respectability politics that haven’t aged well. It’s an example of a sitcom whose spinoff is the more impressive and funny show.
“Ostensibly a ‘positive’ image of a Black family, [The Cosby Show] was criticized for inviting white viewers to believe that racial progress had already been achieved,” wrote Hannah Giorgis in her 2021 Atlantic article “The unwritten rules of Black TV.”
A Different World, the Cosby Show spinoff about Hillman College, Cliff and Clair’s fictional alma mater, was, like Frank’s Place, a comedy that wanted to explore the uneasy interactions between ordinary Black people and wealthy Black folks like Southern belle Whitley Gilbert, the lead character for most of A Different World’s run. It also frequently acknowledged that racial progress hasn’t been achieved.
“While Cosby’s show largely ignored issues of race, [A Different World showrunner Debbie] Allen told Cosby that people on her show needed to talk about Blackness and about the issues of the day,” wrote Giorgis. “Under Allen, A Different World went all the places its progenitor wouldn’t. The series never occupied the place in popular culture that The Cosby Show did. But it was far more radical, subtly altering the trajectory of television—both through its handling of race and through the opportunities it gave to Black writers who have shaped the industry in the decades since.”
Worst of all, The Cosby Show has been tarnished by its star/co-creator’s abuse of young actresses who had small roles on the show (W. Kamau Bell interviewed two of them, Eden Tirl and Lili Bernard, during his sobering Showtime docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby, which traced Cosby’s monstrous behavior all the way back to the ’60s) and female stand-ins (Star Trek: Picard alum Michelle Hurd was one of them, and in 2014, she recalled how she kept herself from getting drugged by Cosby). Warner and the other Cosby Show regulars had no idea of the abuse that took place.
“In later years, Cosby would rant about Black women’s supposed promiscuousness and the vulgarity of hip-hop culture and its supposed effect on Black people — ignoring white supremacy and racism, which have been the real enemies of Black Americans since the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” wrote Aramide A. Tinubu in her 2021 NBC News piece about The Upshaws, Mike Epps and Kim Fields’s Netflix sitcom, and its rejection of respectability politics. “And all the while, the prophet of respectability politics had been assaulting women.”
While Warner is swirling in the heavens, Cosby can go rot in hell.
The Cosby Show is simply unwatchable in 2025. The show’s writing contains hints of Cosby’s creepiness: Dr. Huxtable is an OB-GYN who examines women in the basement of his brownstone. The A-story in 1990’s “The Last Barbecue”—an episode that was credited only to Cosby Show writers Bernie Kukoff and Janet Leahy, but Cosby’s fingerprints were clearly all over the A-story—is about Dr. Huxtable slipping an aphrodisiac into his barbecue sauce at a cookout. The Cosby Show saw nothing wrong with Dr. Huxtable drugging Sondra, his oldest daughter, and Denise to make them stop arguing with their respective husbands, whereas if the infinitely funnier It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia did the same type of storyline about an aphrodisiac, it would use the storyline to say, “This is why Dennis is probably a serial killer.”
The only aspect of The Cosby Show I still like coming back to is Warner’s work as Theo, whether it’s from an episode where Theo’s cockiness and ego comically backfired on him or from an episode about his struggles with dyslexia. (Theo’s struggles mirrored the experiences of the late Ennis Cosby, Cosby’s dyslexic son and a close friend of Warner’s.)
Out of all the Cosby Show regulars, Warner was the funniest and most expressive one. Just look at the comedic pain and anguish he acted out as his character was constrained by Denise’s mess of a shirt. Before Jay Sandrich directed tons of episodes of The Cosby Show—including “A Shirt Story”—the frequent Mary Tyler Moore Show episode director helmed over 50 episodes of Soap. Warner was the only former child actor from The Cosby Show whom I could easily picture being able to handle one of Soap’s many—and sometimes physically-exhausting-to-perform—moments of farce where a character keeps failing to kill either another character or themself.
Warner and Carl Anthony Payne II (as Cockroach, Theo’s best friend) were the two child actors who were most at ease in front of The Cosby Show’s live studio audience in New York. It’s not surprising that Warner and Payne continued to act in multi-camera sitcoms, while Lisa Bonet preferred film work after her second and final departure from The Cosby Show and the other child actors are less prolific than Warner, Payne, and Bonet. I quit watching The Cosby Show before Raven-Symoné, who is definitely as prolific as Warner, Payne, and Bonet, was added to the cast.
The Cosby Show’s Raven era was also what Bonnie Hunt claimed was a period of the show when Warner refused to take off his wedding ring even though he was playing an unmarried character. This is just an excuse to post my favorite moment from the 2005 Celebrity Poker Showdown episode where Warner, Hunt, Brad Garrett, Colin Quinn, and the aforementioned Jason Alexander, Warner’s Listen Up co-star, competed against each other: Warner’s enjoyment of Garrett’s hilarious and dead-on Cosby impression, which caused Warner to say to the impressionist and Everybody Loves Raymond alum, “That’s great! White guys usually can’t do Bill Cosby.”
Cosby famously hated Garrett’s impression of him. It’s a great example of how even though he was a stand-up comic, Cosby had no sense of humor about himself—whereas Warner, who wasn’t a stand-up, was the opposite.
Unlike Phylicia Rashad, his TV mom, Warner did not express total support for Cosby during his abuse scandal, which caused cable channels to remove Cosby Show reruns from their lineups, and that in turn caused Warner and the rest of the cast to lose their Cosby Show residuals.
“I can’t defend him or his actions at all,” said Warner to Jemele Hill in 2023. “But I also can’t throw him under the bus completely because I have an understanding of all of the layers. Like, it’s so complex and it’s so many shades of gray that most people will never get. For me, yes, there is the piece of [the] financial hit that we all took, but also, it hasn’t really affected my career.”
Though The Cosby Show was a part of his life he said he moved on from a long time ago, Warner remained proud of his work as Theo and the character’s impact on Black Gen-Xers and viewers of any color who identified with him.
“People will still tell me that ‘It was because of your show that I found out that I had dyslexia,’ ” said Warner on Toure Show.
Warner also said that he would understand if people who used to love that show can’t watch it at all anymore. If you want to revisit how great Warner was as a comedic actor and how solid he was as a dramatic one, my recommendation is to see him effectively combine his comedic and dramatic sides in both seasons of Jeremiah.
A lot of people have been saying, “Rest in piss, Hulk Hogan,” while nobody has said, “Rest in piss, Malcolm-Jamal Warner.” He was a better man than the racist steroid junkie and the hypocritical predator who played his dad for eight years.
Fuck the Costa Rica waters.