We Need to Talk About Cosby (2022) User Reviews

He would still be in prison if he were anyone else,

[aarpcats · 7/10 · 31 January 2022]

In the late 1970s, I went to a comedy club with my housemate, a woman from Philadelphia. I thought the young comics were great, but pretty raunchy. On the way home, I joked that there weren't any funny comics who didn't rely on dirt jokes.

She said, "Well, there's Cosby, He doesn't tell dirty jokes, but he acts like a dirty man. He put his hands on my friend when she went to see him,"

The cab pulled up to our building at that time, and we were distracted by paying the cab driver and getting out the flat keys. That was the end of it.

By 1985, I had moved across the country, gotten married, and gotten involved with showing dogs. My dog did well, and it wasn't until the Southwest finals that I found out it was the same breed that Cosby owned. In fact, my dog was from a litter by the same sire and dame that Cosby owned, which made our dogs brother and sister. I was grooming my dog backstage at the show, when I heard Cosby was visiting the private staging room next to the show ring,

One of the other dog owners knew him, and asked if I wanted to meet him. My husband said he would watch my dog if I wanted to go, and I started off to the staging room. Just then, a woman stepped in front of me and said, "Don't be alone with him. Take your husband with you. It isn't safe."

I only tell you these stories because I am not a model, beauty pageant winner or a showgirl. I am a 70 year old woman who isn't the least bit involved in show biz, And, I am telling you that, to young women in the 1970s and 1980s, Cosby's perfidy was the least kept secret in the United States. If I knew, everyone knew. I was no one special.

Why didn't anyone out him? Women tried. They were humiliated.

And, let's be honest, no one wanted to believe that a decent black man would do the things those two women told me he did. No one in my liberal, white and black circle of friends wanted it to be true. And we knew he wouldn't be prosecuted if he were arrested.

We hate Hugh Hefner and we hated that sexism, but there was no way to fight it. We just worked on passing the ERA.

I'm glad Cosby got caught. I wish he were still in prison. But, more than anything, I wish he hadn't been a monster who let down all the people who believed in him,

There's nothing new in this documentary, if you have been paying attention. But most people aren't paying attention, which is how Cosby got away with it so long,

I was afraid to watch this, but ..............

[thejdrage · 9/10 · 28 February 2022]

Wow. Brilliant documentary. It certainly went back in his history and further afield with his life than I expected. I learned a lot about Cosby, the man, I did not know before.

I loved him as America's dad, but that ship has passed. Author Ann Rule said to love the man but hate the deed (and she was talking about Ted Bundy!), but Cosby went way over the line.

I am very glad I watched this with an open mind. Yes, I am going to say the women were awesome! And brave.

THANK YOU, Kamau Bell!!

If you had any doubt about who Bill Cosby really is...

[paul-allaer · 7/10 · 6 February 2022]

As Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" (2022 release; 4 episodes of about 58 min each) opens, various talking heads offer their view of what has become of Bill Cosby these days. "The juxtaposition is just bananas", offers one. That would be the understatement of the year. We then go back in time as Cosby makes his first appearance on the Jack Paar show in 1963, and his career takes off in no time. But a dark side also emerges soon...

Couple of comments: this TV mini-series documentary is written, produced and directed by comedian W. Kamau Bell, who readily admits to having idolized Cosby as a kid (and he's not the only one). Indeed, the juxtaposition of Cosby as America's dad and Cosby as the serial rapist is hard to stomach, but the evidence as to the latter is undeniable and overwhelming, just as is his track record as one of the greatest comedians in American history. The key moments in this series are when women provide in-depth, first hand accounts of what Cosby did to them: he drugged them, and then he raped them. And then they blamed themselves (a/k/a "victim blaming"). Cosby got away with it for DECADES. How many women did he sexually assault during that span? Hundreds? Thousands? (Please note that Cosby was found guilty of sexual assault in 2018. In June, 2021, he was released on a technicality. Still that makes him a convicted felon, and not just "alleged" as IMDb lists it here.) Bottom line: this mini-series is revelatory in many ways, presenting both sides of the person that is Bill Cosby. To which I kept thinking: "how does this guy sleep at night?"

Episode 1 of "We Need To Talk About Cosby" premiered in Showtime last Sunday, and new episodes are released on Sunday evenings. (If you have SHO On Demand and SHO Anytime, as I do, all episodes are already available.) If you have any interest in Bill Cosby or how he got away with what he did for all these years, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Devastating

[dmasursky · 10/10 · 5 February 2022]

Like Kamau, I grew up with Cosby. I adored Fat Albert, I laughed until I couldn't breathe listening to his comedy albums. It is incredibly heart wrenching to discover what a terrible person he was. It's also truly horrifiying to confront how many people over the years helped him keep that secret. And it's awesome in the worst possible sense of the word to realize how one person can be two utterly different people, one who does tremendous good in the world and one who is a monster. Thank you, Kamau, for this amazing and heartbreaking retrospective!

A Needed Conversation

[multiculturegirl-72567 · 9/10 · 31 January 2022]

I think this content is bound to rub many people the wrong way. The director admits that he has a viewpoint from the beginning.

If you are coming to this project to explore Cosby's "innocence" you won't find that here.

What you will find is a nicely paced docuseries that doesn't lie about Bill Cosby's impact to American & Black culture. Instead W. Kamal Bell decenters Bill Cosby the legend and recenters him as a real person while giving space for survivors to tell their stories.

This isn't a piece to simply bash someone who has done bad. It's deeper than that and worth the watch.

Best approach to come to terms with conflicting dualities

[ukgreek · 10/10 · 7 February 2022]

He was definitely both, monumentally important to black lives in the 60s and beyond, and a real monster to individual women. Horrible human being with two faces.

Must watch

[T2TLED · 9/10 · 16 February 2022]

An incredible series. This is an important conversation piece and must be seen. So well done. It's pretty shattering to think about and see what this monster did and how he got away with it for so long. Complete monster.

Important Topic Thoughtfully Presented

[kellyq12 · 6/10 · 3 March 2022]

I really respect the work that W. Kamau Bell does, and once again here, he does a thoughtful, intelligent job covering the crimes of Cosby while also creating the context to help viewers understand Cosby's influence and impact on comedy, entertainment, and racial equality. At times, it gets repetitive and 4 hours was probably more than was needed to cover it all as I got a touch bored midway through, but I finished the series and appreciated the intelligent coverage.

Has been happening since the start of Hollywood.

[plan99 · 10/10 · 27 March 2023]

"The casting couch" has always been around and to a lesser extent it probably still is. Living in the UK I have never seen Bill Cosby in a TV show but he seems to have been extremely popular and very well liked. In 2001 when I was leaving Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas I asked the man who was helping with our bags how long he had worked there and his reply was "twenty years". I asked who was the nicest famous person he had ever met and his immediate reply was "Frank Sinatra", I asked him who the least nice famous person he had ever met was and he replied immediately "Bill Cosby", he was a black man so he was not being racist. This was 13 years before the rape allegations were made. The UK version of Cosby is Jimmy Savile, who like Cosby had the public persona of a nice person who did a lot of charity work but in reality he was a sexual predator of very young girls. For every monster uncovered how many go undiscovered?

An excellent documentary with a few flaws

[jrinvest · 7/10 · 26 February 2022]

As a grade schooler in the '60s, I owned several comedy records by Bill Cosby and loved them. In 1966 four cousins spent the entire summer with my family, and we kids endlessly repeated these routines for each other. I can recite most of them to this day.

My father developed pancreatic cancer in 1970 when I was twelve. One of the last fun things we did together before he was bedridden was attend a live Cosby performance here in St. Louis at Kiel Auditorium. Cosby was even more hilarious in person, performing some material I have never seen or heard since.

About that same time, I bought another Cosby album entitled "200 MPH." The title routine is about Cosby's love of fast cars, and total lack of knowledge about them. "Fill 'er up, that's what I know" he explains. "One time the attendant couldn't find the where the gas tank was. I didn't know where it was either. He said 'Maybe if I just pour it on the car, it'll suck in somewhere.'"

The routine goes on to explain that Carroll Shelby learns of Cosby's love of fast cars and builds Cosby a supercharged Cobra, promising him the car will exceed 200 MPH. (This routine, like many of Cosby's, is based on real events.)

At the end of this hilarious routine, the car so terrifies Cosby that he tells the Shelby American driver who delivered the car to give it to George Wallace.

For a twelve year old kid who dreamed of owning a 427 Cobra, this was the Holy Grail of comedy routines.

Fast forward to the fall of 1977. I'm in the parking lot of a shopping mall outside Amherst, Massachusetts, where I was a Junior in college. Walking to my car, I spot a vehicle I have never seen before, either on the road or in pictures. It has a Porsche emblem on its nose. Staying at least two feet away, and never touching the car, I examine it from every possible angle. Finally I lie down on the ground to inspect the exhaust system to try and learn more about what kind of engine is in the car. A pair of shoes comes into view near my head and the owner asks "Can I help you?"

"What is this?" I respond, standing up and looking at the man. It's Bill Cosby.

"It's a car." No smile, nothing.

"Do you know where the gas cap is on this one?", I ask with a grin.

"GET LOST," he tells me, with a face full of anger if not hatred.

I nodded once and walked away. Maybe he was just having a bad day, but it should have been obvious that I was a fan. BTW the car was a 928, one of the first dozen or so in the country.

After that incident, I began to notice an undercurrent of hostility during Cosby interviews on television. When the news came out about the rapes, it all fit.

As to the documentary itself, one of my complaints about it, and about some of the commenters, is grouping Cosby with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, etc.

No no no! Those other men may be guilty of being boorish, or cads, or "sexually harassing" women, or whatever, but there is a world of difference between a powerful producer pointing his finger at the casting couch and giving the would-be starlet a knowing look, and drugging a woman's drink and then raping her while she's unconscious.

As many people have pointed out, there are many, many attractive women who are perfectly willing to have sex with rich, successful, famous, influential men, either for a potential career benefit, or even just for the experience itself.

Furthermore, if normal sex doesn't do it for you, and having sex with women while they're unconscious is your particular kink, there are certainly attractive women who will gladly agree to that for a fee that is absolutely trivial to someone making millions of dollars a month or whatever.

Someone, ANYONE involved in Cosby's businesses should have recognized that fact and acted on it, to both safeguard the goose laying the golden eggs, and to protect hundreds of innocent women from irreparable emotional harm.

Second criticism of the documentary: almost nothing about WHY Cosby's son Ennis was murdered. Just like Cosby's rape proclivities, rumors have circulated for years about why Ennis was killed. I wanted to see that issue addressed in some way in the documentary.

The Cosby Show And Tell

[Lejink · 8/10 · 21 March 2023]

In the U. K. where I've lived most of my life, Bill Cosby, while well-known, wasn't as prominent a figure as he was in his native America. I only remember him for two things, his breakthrough dramatic part in the mid-60's Bond-influenced hit spy-series "I Spy" and especially in the 80's as the respected, beloved father-figure in the long-running even bigger hit comedy show named after him "The Cosby Show". As this four-part docu-series makes clear though, in America he was massive, one of the richest, most influential and popular television actors of the second half of the 20th century, but also successful as a straight actor, stand-up comedian and all-round, often proselytising black establishment icon.

I, like many, at first personally found it hard to believe that such a powerful figure with such a wholesome reputation and having the ability one might have thought to obtain or do anything he wanted (within the law of course), would instead turn out to be a sociopath, secretly drugging and raping scores of young women throughout his long career in the public eye. But there I see I've used the word powerful and of course that's why he was able to do and keep on doing it, until his victims finally started to break cover and tell their almost identical stories of abuse at the hands of "America's dad".

This four-part documentary by W Kamau Bell gives us his back-story as it takes us through Cosby's stellar rise to fame in the 60's, 70's and especially the 80's and 90's but each time punctures the big balloon created by introducing different female victims telling their own story of how this apparently happily-married megastar, who we see being decorated by then President George W Bush, receiving honorary doctorates and being hugged by Oprah Winfrey, lured them into one-to-one encounters with him which invariably ended up with them winding up naked in bed and certain they'd been violated by him.

This series pulls no punches, jumping clear off the fence to give Cosby's accusers' testimonies further amplification. Arraying beside them on a range of direct-to-camera-facing chairs and sofas, are a number of social commentators, journalists, psychologists, aspirant black comedians and a number of actors who previously worked with Cosby. His reputation and legacy are ruthlessly torn down, as, on the evidence shown here, it absolutely should be.

Most galling of all for the victims however was the sight of Cosby being freed from incarceration after serving only three years inside, getting out on a legal technicality, as one participant says, good law aiding a bad man, his legal team still defiantly proclaiming his innocence with their normally effusive star client standing mutely beside them.

And yet, as powerful and at times harrowing as it was for me to watch, I would still I think have appreciated some balance, some counter-defence to the charges made. Certainly Cosby always protested his own innocence and he even has his supporters, most prominently I believe, his "Cosby Show" television wife Phylicia Rashad.

Having said that, I personally had no doubt at all of his culpability. How could I not, after watching the honesty and bravery of these several women coming forward to take on this major establishment figure.

Director Bell provides his own commentary and opinions throughout the full four hours but in the main serves up his film as a platform for these women to tell their stories and in doing so vindicate themselves, confront their own demons and try, if ultimately fail to put away for good a deeply depraved person of extreme power and position.

Nevertheless, like Simpson, Weinstein and R Kelly alongside him, Cosby's reputation and legacy lie in ruins and one can only hope that in the final analysis further high-profile exposure cases like this, speaking truth to power, just might help stop a lot sooner some of the horrific acts of concealed criminality laid bare here by those who think their wealth and celebrity status makes them above the law.

Important conversation that leaves some things to be desired

[brchthethird · 7/10 · 4 February 2022]

Much like real life, this docuseries starts out great but fumbles the finish. There was so much about Cosby's early career that I had never heard before, and which actually deepened my respect for him in some ways, having known him mostly for his eponymous 80's sitcom and Kids Say the Darnedest Things. All of the interviews with survivors also felt important, if a little hard to stomach. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in what larger message it wants us to leave with. Discussions about the corrupting effect of power, America's fraught racial past, etc. Are important issues that need to be reckoned with, and in some ways, we are doing that. The question that never seems to cross people's minds is just how much we are still reaping the fruits of the sexual revolution in terms of what kind of behavior we tolerate as socially acceptable, irrespective of the circumstances. Until we are able to directly confront questions of sexual morality and its effect on culture, stories like Cosby's will continue to need to be told. We need to talk about Cosby, yes, but there are much deeper things that should be explored as well.

Why is this necessary

[saccitygrl · 2/10 · 2 February 2022]

I was willing to give this mini-series a go despite the bad review I had seen about it. But after suffering through the first episode, I am not interested in watching any more of it.

The title is definitely of click bait calibur but the content falls short. It appears that the only one who needs to talk about Cosby is the Director W Kamau Bell. I imagine its just to make a buck.

As to the first episode, it goes on for a full hour about Cosby's career in the 60's. This is a bit over the top. When they started deep diving into the tangential connection between Cosby and the Playboy Club, I started to tune out.

Why is it necessary to go into every nitty gritty detail of his early career. Is it to paint Cosby as some iconoclast who later falls from the pedestal built by the director? Boring and trite and in this case, not true. For most, Cosby was a blip on the screen before the Cosby show in the 80s. Only if you were into Fat Albert or watched the HBO special Cosby Himself was he even remotely on the radar of most people. I remember him on I Spy--it was not a sensation they make it out to be in this program. It was cancelled after 3 years.

Course, my opinion may arise from having never had much respect for Cosby after learning he referred to himself as "Dr." upon receiving an honorary doctorate from Temple--a school he had dropped out from. Who does that?

Seriously, who does that? I mean, he made so much of it, I even knew it was in education.. Obviously someone with ego problems. And time has bore that aspect of his character and much more. His fall from grace is only shocking in how long he got away with it. That is the mortifying part and THAT is what we need to be talking about. Not this drivel.

The Fall of Grace of an American Icon: The Other "Himself" Exposed

[classicalsteve · 9/10 · 20 February 2022]

I've always believed human beings have a darker side. (Even the Force of "Star Wars" has its dark side.) The hope is that the darker side doesn't dictate our behavior. Shockingly , one of America's most beloved iconic entertainment figures, Bill Cosby, had a dark side that controlled secret criminal behavior when he was off-camera. Cosby the entertainer and Cosby the predator appear to be two very different people occupying the same body.

When the truth about Cosby's sexual assaults, not just adultery mind you, was exposed, I was stunned. I had "Himself" on video and many of his comedy albums. I had watched "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" when I was a pre-adolescent kid. He was one of the funniest and most entertaining figures in American entertainment, one who always came off as unpretentious and good-natured. He also seemed to have a high sense of morality until he began ranting about the shortcomings of the African-American community as if they were some kind of monolithic entity. Interestingly shortly after his "rantings" began, the accusations of sexual assault avalanched into the mainstream media when dozens of female victims came forward.

This documentary produced by W. Kamau Bell in four parts is a retrospective on Cosby the lovable entertainer and Cosby the secret predator. Bell's approach is excellent being both a comedian and a commentator-presenter on CNN often producing down-to-earth stories concerning race in America. There is little "script" as the documentary is essentially "written" mostly by the interviewees with occasional comments and narration by Bell. Women and men involved with entertainment, comedy, and show biz news discuss the man they thought he was and who he turned out to be including some fellow comedians and even actors who had worked with Cosby on previous shows. The main bulk of the discussion is with female victims who tell their stories about how Cosby sexually assaulted them. The reason their stories are so very plausible is because of the striking similarities between the incidences.

Cosby had a ready-made sequence concerning how he went about his criminal business. Often Cosby would "invite" a young woman to some kind of social gathering, the understanding being that it was to help the young actress meet people in the industry. But when she came to Cosby's home or hotel, no one else was there but Cosby. He would then offer the girl some sort of beverage often accompanied by a barbiturate. She would lose consciousness and Cosby would have his way with her. She would wake up many hours later disoriented but knowing she had been a victim of rape or some kind of sexual assault at the very least.

In one instance, she asks Cosby what happened and he would tell her to use the phone to call a cab, which tells us he was also misogynistic. He didn't care at all about the girls he assaulted. They were just his playthings to be cast off when he was finished. This fact makes the accusations even more disturbing that he wasn't this kind-hearted fatherly figure but a malicious felon who cared nothing about his victims. So unlike America's Dad of the television show of the 1980's, arguably the highest rated show of that decade.

For perspective I was a Cosby fan. Not so much of the 1980's television show, but his stand-up comic routines, and some of the cartoons. I grew up with "The Electric Company" and "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids", the latter probably my favorite ongoing show with Cosby. I also own many of his stand-up comic albums.

The one show which forever solidified my admiration for Cosby was the HBO special "Himself" which I happened upon accidentally at my grandparent's house. (They were HBO subscribers but my family wasn't.) I began watching this program and I was stunned. To say it was funny and introspective is almost an under-exaggeration. So many of the stories I identified with as a kid. The story "Chocolate Cake" for breakfast made me laugh so hard I was almost gasping for breath. Still possibly the greatest comedic performance of introspective and storytelling humor ever broadcast on cable television. And yet this same man who seemed to know everything about human nature was not as introspective and self-analyzing on "himself" as we thought.

Reconciling the Legacy with the Harsh Reality of Bill Cosby

[EUyeshima · 8/10 · 2 February 2022]

He may be free on a legal technicality, but as director W. Kamau Bell points out in this four-part documentary, his legacy cannot be simply ignored. Bell recognizes the need to re-examine Cosby's life and groundbreaking career through the lens of the comedian's self-admitted behavior as a narcissistic sexual predator. Not only does Bell have some of the survivors recount their unsavory encounters with Cosby, but he also secures others well-versed with his deep cultural impact and challenged by how to reconcile the two Cosbys that co-exist.

The man has skeletons

[mandelaalum · 9/10 · 14 September 2022]

There is no doubt that we all have skeletons but Bill Cosby? I have grown up watching this man in The Cosby Show, Ghost Dad to name but a few. To see the sort of man that this program has depicted him to be has shattered my preconceptions of whom I expected this man to be. For so long, Dr. William Henry Cosby depicted himself as a moralist even using his programs to influence children about the value of education. There is no doubt that because of Dr. Cosby, I found myself going as far as university even attaining a PhD like him. He was my role model. I even wanted to have a family that was similar to his. Yet, W. Kamau Bell's documentary has demonstrated to me that this man has a complicated life. What I have come to learn from this documentary is that life or better still we as humans are complex figures. To the outside world, we depict ourselves as moralists or angels but when one digs deeper, we do carry skeletons in our closet. What this documentary has shown me is that the man certainly has skeletons. Unfortunately, these skeletons had to reveal themselves at his old age.

W. Kamau Bell is the bravest filmmaker on earth!

[guam-73942 · 10/10 · 2 February 2022]

Doing a documentary on Bill Cosby for anyone else other than W. Kamau Bell would be impossible. How do you be objective about a beloved icon who fell from grace so dramatically? Kamau figured out how. By praising Cosby's valid accomplishments and at the same time giving ample space to his victims, Kamau does the impossible and something no other filmmaker could have done - he manages to deify and demonize Cosby at the same time and he does both effectively.

But Kamau wants to love Cosby. That can be seen all the way through the film. Yet his heart is breaking, as our hearts are breaking, that Cosby was not who the world all thought he was.

In the end we are left with the great things Cosby accomplished: the classic comedy albums from the 60's, the Fat Albert show and the classic Cosby show from the 80's and early 90's. Can the art be separated from the artist? It's up to us.

With the comedy... and the women... and the drugs...

[GiraffeDoor · 7/10 · 1 December 2023]

In the vain of the Saville documentary and "Leaving Neverland" we get yet another documentary about idolized figures who allegedly did something bad sexually.

Over many episodes and with an ironic sense of humor about it all, our host takes us into this world of Crosby.

First of course they paint the picture of the man we all saw with his career as an entertainer, a trailblazer and an educator of the masses. An icon of black excellence and black empowerment that everyone could find something to relate to and admire.

I only really know him as that guy on the Cosby show which never really aired much in my country but I know about from other shows.

Of course gradually we see victim testimony and the other side that seems too crazy to believe comes out.

There's a strong tone of waving the flag of justice which neither adds anything nor does it really take anything away.

They begin each segment an uncited quotation that will show up somewhere in the segment.

They really make sure to spell out the significance of so munch stuff with so many experts from toxicologists to sex therapists on hand to explain it.

You get an insiders perspective on how is shows were special and, like with Saville, the clues quite deliciously were all there hiding in plain sight.

The flaw here is an unfortunate tendency to sex-negativity. The sex therapist they had was so obnoxious and they seem to condemn a guy for saying something as benign as "I like thinking of you as a bunny".

I suppose it's sour grapes because no one is going to think of her as one.

And it really needs to be said that ending the statute of limitations is an undemocratic idea. It's fascist mentality I am tempted to say. Just report it earlier now.

We do not get the closure we get with the other two documentaries and I am not going rewatch this one so soon but it's definitely essential viewing.

Testimony of how power and fandom trumps our prudishness for the worse.

Bill Cosby was an absolute monster!!

[sales-32323 · 10/10 · 15 February 2022]

I was so shocked to hear what he had done to his victims. So many women's lives he destroyed by drugging them. What a monster. Why is this guy not in prison?

Morbid legacy

[tonosov-51238 · 7/10 · 25 April 2024]

I have never seen anything Bill Cosby was in. I also can't help but to additionally mention that I've always had a genuine aversion to stand-up comedy to begin with. Hence, I have no nostalgia for this man and essentially no real idea of what he did beyond the vague notion of him being in a couple of sitcoms until Judgment Day rained down on him. That was so loud and impossible to ignore.

I very much appreciate the run-down of his career and the illustration of how his fame mixed with the ego of a forerunner allowed him to do this for decades. However, I disagree with their perceived comparisons to other unholy Hollywood scum arrested around the same time his scandal was being pried into. They just gloss over the drugging and pretend it's on the same tier as sex for favors. No, it's not. If he wanted, he probably would have convinced many of these women to sleep with him without a pill and would have been an authentic point of comparison. Yet you don't even hear anything this basic. So, obviously, making them unconscious was the desired objective for him. Nothing about that is examined beyond bringing up the vague statement of him wanting to have control. Yes, rape is about control. Thank you very much, esteemed psychologist with a diploma. What revelatory input!

There are a lot of participants in the interviews. Nonetheless, when you think about it, some of the interviewees' involvement can be summed up as: "I had a bad run-up with Cosby. Can I talk about his shenanigans in your documentary?" with a zany introspection that how a star acts on the screen doesn't, in actuality, reflect how this person is on a daily basis. Again, a revelation.

The documentary again and again poses the question of how he managed to do it for so long without someone blowing the whistle. "Someone had to know." Kamau Bell keeps repeating. Yet, paradoxically, the other shoe never drops. No one is even being directly accused of covering it up, not even the people who outright admit they knew what Cosby was doing. No, it's the impalpable rape culture. So please believe all accusations women make, regardless of the burden of proof. Honestly, it was just as expected of a standpoint as the requisite racism chapter. The only thing I agree with in the whole discussion is that the statute of limitations shouldn't exist for any crime that has a victim.

Of course, the most striking aspect of the documentary is that he was released while they were filming, so you get to see a "live reaction to that information" from a big cast of interviewees and an examination of the denial of his supporters.

Shocking and informative

[bovnyccc · 10/10 · 15 August 2022]

This documentary is the stuff of Greek Tragedy. Cosby's actions were hubris to the nth degree. The evidence certainly cannot be ignored. The women's stories were heartbreaking. I am younger by Cosby but old enough that as a kid, I watched "I Spy" and a friend played me one of his albums. I wasn't A big fan but thought he was funny and talented. He wasn't let go on a technicality. It was prosecutorial misconduct - another example of misogyny. It's clear the DA didn't think the women's testifying was sufficient and he needed Cosby's own words from his deposition. If that's how he felt, he never should have brought the case.

The one thing the documentary did was show how important to the black community he was.. He was their idol. I can't imagine how betrayed and angry they were discovering their idol had feet of clay.

Bill Was A Scumbag

[DavoZed · 5/10 · 31 May 2022]

Bill was a monster from day one.

When he started his entertainment career, being a monster was accepted and not mentioned. So it took dozens or perhaps hundreds of women being drugged and raped, to get him into a courtroom and into jail.

This series leaves NO doubt that he was a monster and should have been locked up decades earlier. Many many women would have been saved from his sexual predation if that had happened.

All of that said, this series did not need to be 4 hours long, it is endlessly repetitious. It is full of a long lineup of talking heads, giving their opinion on his career, his influence on them and even on his crimes against women.

The key points made by this series could have been made in 60 to 90 minutes, I would think.

There was never any doubt that Bill was guilty, given the dozens of alleged rapes he has been accused of. If you harbor any doubts about his guilt, sit down and watch this and then you can move on.

Important documentary

[seraichyk · 9/10 · 17 March 2022]

This is a perfect combination of homage to the amazing work of an iconic legend...who in the end, we learn...is an unethical, pathological, nightmare of a human being. This documentary is specifically about the way we feel about learning that this revered man, is not who we thought. So, it needed to cover all the details of his mastery and his debauchery... Anyone who's got a problem with either aspect of the story, isn't understanding the point.

Must See

[tkdlifemagazine · 8/10 · 29 August 2022]

This thoughtful and intelligent look at the complexity of the legacy of Bill Cosby is a must see. While the creator, W. Kamu Bell, makes it clear about his opinion of the guilt of Cosby, that does not stop him from doing two important things. The first is to provide a platform for a wide variety of opinions on Cosby and his legacy. The second is highlight the positive and negative impacts in a societal and personal way. There are a tons of interviews of people who have first hand accounts, were influenced by Cosby, and experts in the industry. The footage of Cosby on television, in standup, and in movies, makes this worth seeing alone. It is an archive of great film and television. One of the complexities of this project is that as it was completed there was a dramatic change in the legal proceedings against Cosby-which extended the project. I have seen Bill Cosby several times live. He was amazing. His impact on the world was amazing. That doesn't change by my belief that he did terrible things. It is complex. I don't have an opinion more than that people are more than any one thing they do, or don't do.

Wonderfull and informative

[kathylombard-13271 · 10/10 · 7 February 2022]

I am enjoying watching this documentary series because I have always been an admirer of Bill Cosby and I want to know what is really the truth.

However, although the producer/director, that interviews several people has captioning for his questions, the people being interviewed and the announcer doesn't have captions. This is a problem for those of us with hearing loss.

I have captioning on my Samsung but it doesn't work for your documentary or several films from HBO.

Please address this issue.

Thank you.