The most complete and satisfying answer to that question is the docuseries itself. Bell, best known as a stand-up comedian and the host of CNN’s United Shades of America, proves himself to be a deft and compassionate documentarian as he examines both the bad and the good of the disgraced comedic icon’s legacy and career. (Cosby’s alarmingly fast and acclaimed rise through TV in the 1960s, as both a stand-up comic and the star of the hit series I Spy, are fascinating and especially striking given the context Bell provides illustrating how rare a Black star of the screen was at the time.) The documentary speaks directly with several of Cosby’s accusers and also boasts a stellar lineup of Black thinkers, writers, artists and celebrities, including academics and authors Marc Lamont Hill and Jelani Cobb, journalist Jemele Hill, former Cosby co-star Doug E. Doug,The Cosby Show’s LiliBernard and Joseph C. Phillips, and more. We Need to Talk About Cosby can be difficult to watch at times regardless of your personal opinion on Cosby and his scandals, but Bell’s work follows through on the promise of its title: After you’re done watching, you really will want to talk about Cosby. That’s exactly what Parade.com did recently with Bell ahead of the docuseries’ premiere. Keep reading to find out why Bell decided to direct We Need to Talk About Cosby, how he talks with his children about difficult subjects and the quote he’s most proud of in the series.
Let me ask you a very obvious question to start. Why do we still need to talk about Cosby?
Because it’s a conversation that is happening in sort of fits and starts and corners of society and corners of culture, but I think many of us feel like we can’t have the whole conversation about Bill Cosby. There is stuff you can point to and go, “That’s a good thing he did”—but if you’re going to do that, it feels like you’re ignoring these 60-plus women who have come forward. So it feels like, if we’re going to talk about these good things, then you have to talk about these awful things that I believe he did. And then it feels like, now you’ve got to process all of it and say, what does this mean about him? What does this mean about America? What does this mean about us individually? And the biggest question is, wherever you fall on this, how do we prevent that going forward on a societal scale that’s bigger than Bill Cosby? How do we create a world that is safer for women, safer for victims of sexual assault and encourages them to come forward because they know they will be listened to and they will be helped.
You have talked about Cosby on CNN, and I believe in your stand-up… what was it that made you think, I want to talk about him more and create this whole docuseries?
The seeds were sown for me—and I didn’t even really realize this at the time—when I saw EzraEdelman’s O.J. Simpson: Made in America. Because I think a lot of us were like, why would I want to watch a seven-and-a-half-hour documentary about O.J. Simpson? I don’t care about football, you know, what is there to talk about? And the minute you press play and the first 20 minutes in, you’re like, Oh, this is about us. This is a vehicle to talk about us… That’s how you have to talk about Bill Cosby. You have to sort of look at it from a bigger perspective. If you’re going to get in the good stuff, you have to talk about the whole thing and say, “What does this say about us?”
One of the women you speak to in the docuseries [Boston Globe columnist Renee Graham] calls Cosby “a rapist who had a successful TV show,” which—up until I watched We Need to Talk About Cosby—was my opinion exactly. Then Kierna Mayo [a culture writer and former Ebony editor in chief] said, “Bill Cosby is the catalyst for understanding the American experiment” and that really stopped my in my tracks.
Thank you! I can tell the producers that I was right, then, because there was a back-and-forth about that line.
That, and then some things that you yourself say at the end, those statements really opened my mind and helped me reconcile everything.
I mean that Kierna Mayo quote, the minute she said it, I was like, that’s it, that’s the whole thing, that’s the reason for the film, [but] Renee Graham… her stridency throughout the whole thing, the way she approached it—like, we can talk about this, but I’m not moving off this corner—I think that was just as important.
I know that you have three children and they’re all still pretty young, right?
They’re 10, 7 and 3 and a half.
OK, so maybe with your 10-year-old, have you talked about Cosby? Do your kids ask what you’ve been up to at work the last couple years?
I mean, they have definitely asked [and] they have a sense that I’m working on a big project about a very complicated person—and it’s not that I wouldn’t tell them more, it’s just we have to sit down and have the conversation, as opposed to having it while I’m running into the office and they’re running out to school. My 10- and my 7-year-old, they know who George Floyd is, they understand he was killed by police, they know that Black Lives Matter. They know what’s going on in the world. We will have this conversation at some point. For me, for kids that age, it becomes about, like, just because a person does something good doesn’t mean they also can’t do things that are bad.
Right. Which is, to be honest, the part that even as adults grappling with this and watching something like We Need to Talk About Cosby, it’s very hard to make space for.
Honestly, I think kids understand that clearer than we do. I think kids understand right and wrong in a very clear way and kids also know, yeah, I was bad yesterday and today I’m good. So it’s not as complicated as we think. As adults, we complicate it because we want to hold onto our preconceived notions or first impressions or the things that are important to us—and as we know in this country, many of us aren’t great at taking in new information. We Need to Talk About Cosby’s first episode is available now to stream on Showtime. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 will premiere respectively on Feb. 6, Feb. 13 and Feb. 20. This interview has been edited for length and clarity Next, Jonathan Van Ness Tells Us About His New Netflix Series Getting Curious, Getting More Queer Eye and the One Winter Essential Everyone Needs
