Bell's four-part Showtime docuseries explores Bill Cosby's legacy as a TV icon and a convicted predator, showing how his fame, influence and criminality were all connected.
“Difficult conversations is kinda what I do,” W. Kamau Bell observes near the end of his four-part Showtime docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby.
We Need to Talk About Cosby isn’t the Bill Cosby documentary that Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil) would have made, and it isn’t the Bill Cosby documentary that Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (Allen v. Farrow) would have made, and it isn’t the Bill Cosby documentary that Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland) would have made, and we can surely all take a second to be truly saddened that “celebrity sexual abuse scandal” has needed to become a genre of documentary.
We Need to Talk About Cosby
W. Kamau Bell isn’t exactly an investigative journalist and he isn’t exactly a dirt-digging muckraker, and the case of Bill Cosby doesn’t really require such a specialist. Cosby has been accused of sexual assault by more than 60 women, he was convicted in one of the cases and the fact that he is a free man today is a product of a legal technicality and not, in any way, an exoneration. If you require “proof” of Bill Cosby’s crimes, We Need to Talk About Cosby won’t be a documentary for you, though it features extended and reasonably graphic accounts of Cosby violations from several of his accusers.
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Those other imaginary Bill Cosby documentaries would have served their purpose, but We Need to Talk About Cosby is, for the most part, exactly the right documentary for the moment and Bell is clearly the right filmmaker to have crafted it. It’s a complicated and pragmatic project, and here’s the important caveat or warning: For some people, the conversation about Bill Cosby isn’t a difficult one at all. He’s been accused of sexual assault by 60+ women and that’s the conversation right there. That’s the legacy. Full stop.
This is not that documentary either.
Over four hours, Bell and a varied panel of invested parties go through Cosby’s journey in the public eye, from early standup to I Spy to Fat Albert to The Cosby Show to the accusations, trial, conviction and release that have superseded everything that came before.
Bell’s interview subjects include standups and standup historians (like Godfrey and Wayne Federman), co-stars and creative collaborators (like Doug E. Doug and Matt Williams), academics (like Marc Lamont Hill and Todd Boyd) and cultural critics of all stripes (like Jemele Hill, Renee Graham and Mo Ryan), along with the aforementioned accusers. Beyond their candor and clarity and the nightmare of it all, the survivors represent ties to distinctive steps along Bill Cosby’s journey — his Cosby Show fame, his various residencies in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, his tenure studying at UMass-Amherst. The voices of countless other accusers are presented from other documentaries and news interviews, slotted within a five-decade timeline of predation.