W. Kamau Bell Reconsiders Bill Cosby’s Legacy In New Documentary

W. Kamau Bell says he has been thinking about Bill Cosby for decades. “He has been a presence in my life for my whole life,” says the comedian. “I’ve never met him. But Hannibal Burress’s joke [in 2014, about Cosby being a rapist] sort of forced us, many of us for the first time, to put all these different Cosbys together: America’s dad, the scold of Black people, and a person who is accused of sexual assault and rape. We put them into one package and are sort of wrestling with what does that mean for all this good feeling I used to have for Bill Cosby.”

In his new four-part documentary, Bell tries to find an answer. We Need to Talk About Bill Cosby, which premieres Sunday on Showtime, looks at the comedian from different angles. It includes interviews with dozens of people, including some who consider or considered Cosby a friend, others who worked with him, and several who allege he assaulted them.

The nuanced picture that emerges seems right for this moment, as the country grapples with how to redefine the legacy of those once thought of as “good guys” who have been brought to justice (and rightfully so) by the #MeToo movement. Do we cancel Dr. Cliff Huxtable? Should we? Can we? Have we already?

Bell delivers plenty of evidence for doing so. But he also notes there’s no straightforward answer to how to reckon with Cosby’s legacy. For all the harm the pioneering comedian has done, he also did some good, such as insisting that producers use Black stuntman for him on the 1960s hit drama I Spy, something that simply wasn’t done at the time. Cosby’s action opened new doors for African Americans. It’s a small but notable event that could be lost with Cosby’s (again, rightfully) shaky legacy.

“Most people don’t know that story,” Bell says about the stuntmen. Talk includes a fascinating segment about it. “And it seems to me like we can’t just throw that history away. We just have to add it to what we now know about Bill Cosby. I think Roland Martin [an interview subject in the doc] puts it best when he says you can’t talk about Black people in the 20th century without talking about Bill Cosby.”

Bell says his focus was to take the discussions that usually occur behind closed doors and bring them out in the open. Not everyone was ready to do that. He says he conducted hours of conversations that never made it into the doc because people changed their minds, or they simply told him at the end of taping that they wanted to talk, but it wasn’t for public consumption. That’s a risk when you try to take public any conversation that involves rape culture, race and gender equality.

“I think for people of all races who grew up in Bill Cosby’s America, this is a third-rail conversation. And then for Black people, there’s several, more electrified rails that are being added to the conversation,” Bell says. “If you’re a Black performer or a Black public figure, and you talk about Bill Cosby, there’s a sense I got from people that, ‘There’s no way for me to talk about this without making somebody angry, somebody who I value as a member of my community or a member of my audience or member of my family.’”

Some of the revelations are astounding. Bell shows clips where Cosby makes veiled or even more overt references giving women drugs without their knowledge. “If I just go by what Bill Cosby tells me, he’s a creep,” says Marc Lamont Hill, a professor at Temple University, Cosby’s alma mater. “So Bill Cosby tells us all of that, why would I not believe the dozens of women who’ve come forward and corroborated the same kinds of stories?”

Actors who appeared on The Cosby Show recall during Talk the lines of women sent to Cosby’s dressing room after taping. Says Joseph C. Phillips, “I guess they would read or, I don’t know what went on, and then they would go out. It was just kind of like the air. You know, it was there, and everybody knew it.” A model who appeared on the show, Eden Tirl, agrees, claiming Cosby sexually harassed her, and “I don’t believe that that’s the first time that happened. I don’t believe that the people on that set didn’t know what was happening.”

So how to reckon the public and private images of Cosby, who has been accused of sexual assault by more than 50 women? As Michael Jai White, an actor, says in episode four, “Here’s a guy I love on one level, but you do that to someone, you’re a fucking monster. You’re a fucking monster.”

Ultimately, Bell says, his documentary is not just about Cosby. He wants to start and maintain a dialogue about rape culture, including what causes it and how to end it. “It really is an opportunity for us to have better conversations about the systems that define this country,” he says.