How ‘A Different World’ Survived the Downfall of Cosby

For many, “The Cosby Show” has become unwatchable since the dozens of sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby entered the media spotlight. Some networks, such as TV Land, have pulled the show from their lineups. (Others, like Bounce TV, initially did the same, only to resume airing reruns up until the verdict came in this year. It remains available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.)

But “A Different World,” the popular “Cosby” spinoff that ended its original run 25 years ago this week, does not seem to have inspired the same amount of hand-wringing as its predecessor.

Among the many pieces that have been written about Cosby’s legacy and how we square it away with the man himself, few pay much attention to “A Different World,” which he created. And articles about the sitcom — including a spate of them last fall around another milestone, the 30th anniversary of its September 1987 premiere — tend to mostly leave Cosby’s transgressions out of it. When “black-ish” creator Kenya Barris added “grown-ish” earlier this year, he openly cited “A Different World” as an influence and expressed hope that his own show could have a similar cultural impact.

Some of the reasons for this continued affection are obvious. While Cosby’s name appears in the credits for each episode, he only appeared on screen in three of them, all in Season 1. And after that season, which centered on Denise Huxtable’s (Lisa Bonet) transition to university life at the fictional Hillman College, the series was completely revamped.

The result of — and possibly a motivation for — this separating of art from artist allows the show to be a repository for the tender sentiments that have been displaced by the retroactive tarnishing of “The Cosby Show.”

As someone who grew up watching and enjoying both shows (though I was too young to remember their original runs), I can relate to this. I have not wanted to revisit the Huxtable family since Hannibal Buress’ scathing onstage condemnation of Cosby in 2014 that encouraged more women to come forward and accuse Cosby of sexual assault. But I did binge all six seasons of “A Different World” a couple of summers ago when it finally landed on Netflix. (It is now on Amazon.) While I would rather not again see the Huxtables lip sync to Ray Charles’ “Night Time Is the Right Time” or Claire cut down her children’s dumb retorts with aplomb, I can at least give myself Whitley, Dwayne, Freddie and Kim.

It helps that “A Different World” was a more challenging, and arguably more meaningful show. When Debbie Allen took over as producer and director in Season 2, she famously made it her mission to set it apart from its more benign predecessor by having the writers tackle more substantive issues, including colorism within the black community, AIDS and shopping while black.

Last year, Brittany Brathwaite wrote for The Root about how the show was ahead of its time. In a recent phone conversation, she told me that because of the creative risks it took, she has “seriously severed Bill Cosby from ‘A Different World.'”

“Do we have to cut off the contributions that the show itself made,” she continued, “and all the people that helped contribute to what that was? It’s a tension that feels gross, but at the same time feels necessary.”

Khris Khal Davenport, who has also written appreciatively of “A Different World,” told me that he finds it easier to consume than “The Cosby Show.” The sensitive topics it tackled in its later seasons “makes that a more important show,” he told me.

At least one cast member has echoed those sentiments. A few weeks after Cosby’s conviction on three counts of sexual assault, Kadeem Hardison, who portrayed Dwayne Wayne, a nerdy Hillman College student (and later, professor), told TMZ that “A Different World” is “much bigger than Bill Cosby.”

I agree. But such compartmentalization is not always easy — even if the man himself is not the face of the show, its origins as a spinoff will always linger in plain sight. This becomes particularly noticeable when one considers how some of the subjects “A Different World” addressed, such as sexual assault, have dark resonance in its creator’s private life.

“There was something ugly happening behind the scenes,” Ezinne Ukoha, who has not been able to enjoy “A Different World” in the same way others have, told me recently, in reference to the accusations against Cosby that stretch back decades. “But it was presented as something that was clean fun.” In May, Ukoha wrote a piece in Medium: “Why My Childhood Dies With Bill Cosby’s Legacy.”

Perhaps the comfort of nostalgia cannot and should not ever be completely divorced from the realities of its roots, but the way some of us cope is by transferring all those warm memories onto one work and discarding the ugliest bits of the rest.

It is a selfish compromise, to be sure, one that the women who have come forward with allegations against Cosby most likely cannot even consider. But it is impossible to totally erase a history as influential as Cosby’s, and as consumers we can choose how we engage with it ourselves. For me, at least, the choice is holding on tight to the one part that turned out to be the most progressive and ahead of its time — the part that least resembles its devious creator.