Cosby: Cast Photo - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Cosby was Bill Cosby's 3rd hit sitcom. It ran from September 1996 until April 2000 on CBS.

Four years after the long-running Cosby Show left the air, Bill Cosby returned to sitcom tv ( with Phylicaia Rashad again playing his wife), as a considerably less afluent New Yorker. Hilton Lucas ( Bill Cosby), was a cranky but lovable curmudgeon who at age 60, was adjusting to a major life change: being unemployed. After 30 years of working for an airline, he had just been pink-slipped as part of a corporate downsizing. In addition to the frustrations attendant with having too much free time, Hilton was put out by all the little things he found wrong with the world-everything from misleading advertising, to having to take a number and stand in line at his doctor's office, to the way people parked in front of his home. Ruthie ( Phylicia Rashad), his loving wife, worked part-time with her eccentric best friend Pauline ( Madeline Kahn), at a flowershop in their Queens, New York neighborhood. Hilton's daughter Erica ( T'Keyah Crystal Keymah), a young attorney with a Manhattan law firm, was unsure about her career, which annoyed him no end. Griffin ( Doug E. Doug), Erica's jittery High School classmate and current platonic roommate was intent on wooing her, but she wasn't interested.

At the start of Cosby's second season, the living arrangements at the Lucas household got considerably more crowded. Erica left the lawfirm to become a chef. She moved back into her old room, and Griffin, licking his wounds after a failed business deal, moved into their attic. That way he could rent the house next door to Hilton's, which he had just purchased, to a pre-school. Angelo ( Angelo Massagli), was one of the children at the pre-school. The struggling flower shop started serving Erica's cookies and coffee and it became so popular it was converted into a coffee shop and rechristened The Flower Cafe.

In the fall of 1998, Hilton took on the responsibility of watching young Jurnee ( Jurnee Smollett), after school until her dad, Del ( Sinbad), got home from work. Griffin and Erica were about to move into his house when it burned to the ground, leaving the living arrangements as they had been for the previous year. Griffin, still trying to find himself, decided he wanted to become a teacher. He took courses so he could get a teaching license and did a little substitute teaching. In the spring of 1999 Erica and her new boyfriend Darien ( Darien Sills-Evans), an airline flight attendant got engaged. Their marriage took place in the second episode of the 1999-2000 season;Erica was working as a substitute teacher, which eventually led to a full-time position. In October Ruth and Pauline took over the neighborhood bookstore and annexed it to The Flower Cafe. Madeline Kahn who played Pauline died of cancer soon after and the cast payed tribute to her in a December 1999 episode which featured the cast as themselves reminiscing about Kahn. Clips, bloopers and outtakes from Kahn's four years on the show were highlighted. Cosby was never a major success, but the series garnered respectable ratings and was a solid entry in CBS's schedule. But during the last season, frequent time slot changes, and the death of Madeline Kahn undermined the show and it was canceled in the spring of 2000.

This series was based on the British series, One Foot In The Grave.

An Article from Entertainment Weekly
Published May 3, 1996

Cosby's Last 'Show'
The Huxtables said goodbye after eight hot years on April 30, 1992

By Kate Meyers

Before the days of Jennifer Aniston's 'do and George Clooney's scrubs, Mr. Jell-O Pudding owned Thursdays, with a long-shot hit no one could have predicted would succeed so well and for so long.

In fact, when producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner persuaded a desperate, last-place NBC to give Bill Cosby a time slot back in 1984, he had not been seen regularly on TV for eight years, except as a high-profile pitchman for Coke, Jell-O, and Kodak. But Cosby's Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, an OB-GYN with a lawyer wife and a brood of five, would administer a miracle cure. The Cosby Show shot to the top of the Nielsens in 1985 and stayed there for five years. It rescued an entire network (the NBC shows that followed Cosby — Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court — climbed a total of 19 ratings spots) and resuscitated the sitcom: The number of comedies in the top 10 nearly doubled after Cosby began.

Before the demographically divvied, zillion-channel cable universe arrived, Cosby was the last show everyone watched. At its peak, 63 million viewers welcomed the funny travails of these hardworking parents who ruled the roost, stressed family and education, and just happened to be African-American. ''The Huxtables were set up to counter some of the minstrel shows Hollywood had set up,'' Cosby told Jane Pauley in 1992. There were no gimmicks, no gags, no ghetto, no loud George Jefferson types, no one screaming ''Dyn-O-Mite!''

Instead, for eight years the Huxtables served up a steady diet of family values, until Cosby admitted he had told all the stories he wanted to tell. So, with a one-hour finale on April 30, 1992, the door to the brownstone at 10 Stigwood Avenue in Brooklyn Heights closed for good and Cliff and Clair danced into the sunset. Every paper ran stories. The Today show ran a four-part Cosbyfest. Even in L.A., where post-Rodney King rioting had broken out, Mayor Tom Bradley urged citizens to ''observe the curfew and watch The Cosby Show.''

As the man with total creative control over this cultural phenomenon, Cosby succeeded in making the show he wanted — and became staggeringly rich doing it. (The series snagged over $800 million in syndication.) But he couldn't parlay his prime-time popularity into a career on celluloid — Leonard, Part 6, anyone? — and his recent TV attempts (a remake of You Bet Your Life and The Cosby Mysteries) tanked. This fall on CBS he'll star in a Stateside take on the British sitcom One Foot in the Grave, about a crusty guy who has lost his job. Can he pull it off again? That's another Cosby mystery.

A Review from The New York Times

Dad's So Grumpy Now: The Cosby Persona Goes Into a New Phase of Life

By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: September 16, 1996

Listen, if the grumpy-old-man concept works so well for Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, why not for Bill Cosby? CBS, at least, is banking on a positive answer as the network brings back one of the country's cleverest entertainers in ''Cosby,'' an American riff on a British sitcom called ''One Foot in the Grave.''

This is a big gamble for CBS, the centerpiece in a complicated strategy to restore the ''Tiffany network'' to its former ratings luster. When most of prime time might seem obsessed with the ''Friends''-like clones desperately wooing the kinds of young viewers advertisers covet, ''Cosby'' offers a 60-year-old Queens man who has just been downsized out of a job and seems determined to make everybody in his life as miserable as he is.

Hilton Lucas, the Cosby character, does not go quietly into that unemployable night. Lose his job? Nonsense, he knows where it is. ''My job was taken away from me,'' he'll whine to anyone willing to listen.

Mr. Cosby is a unique American show-business phenomenon. Back in 1965, in ''I Spy,'' he became the first black performer to have a regular starring role in a weekly dramatic series. He went to college and earned a doctorate. He flopped in a couple of prime-time variety shows. He developed an enormously successful stand-up comedy routine, creating from firsthand experience a persona that eventually developed into Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable on ''The Cosby Show,'' a series that single-handedly revived what was supposedly the dead situation-comedy format and nudged NBC into a ratings dominance that has lasted to this day.

Throughout this career, Mr. Cosby has remained remarkably true to himself. In ''I Spy,'' he was already the skeptic ready to cast a baleful eye on the show's more dubious plots. In ''The Cosby Show,'' he was the no-nonsense dad willing to risk the disapproval of his sometimes troublesome but always adorable children. And now in ''Cosby,'' his Hilton merely brings the very familiar persona into a perfectly logical state of being crotchety as old age encroaches. He's an old friend. We've grown up with him.

Shrewdly, Mr. Cosby has brought back Phylicia Rashad, who played his wife, Clair, on ''The Cosby Show,'' to be Hilton's wife, Ruth, in the new series. The chemistry still works, her charm smoothing out the edges of his cantankerousness. For diplomatic Ruth, having Hilton home all day is like having a piano in the kitchen: ''It's beautiful, but it's in the way.''

Meanwhile, he goes about making life difficult for inept dry cleaners and even for his daughter, Erica (T'Keyah Crystal Keymah), who has her own house and is fending off the advances of an ardent tenant named Griffin (Doug E. Doug).

And then there's Pauline, the character that gives ''Cosby'' just the extra bit of edge it needs. Pauline is white. More important, she's played by Madeline Kahn, a wonderful comic actress who has refined deadpan sarcasm into an art form.

Pauline is Ruth's co-worker and best friend and is obviously determined not to feed Hilton's demanding ego. That, in turn, makes him all the more eager to elicit her praise. ''Do you love me, Pauline?'' he asks, anticipating rejection. Without hesitation, she answers, ''When two people have what we have, there are no words.''

Politicians long have paid lip service to the ideal of a nation that could be colorblind. As an entertainer, Mr. Cosby has come tantalizingly close to that mark. He doesn't preach. He simply ignores the obvious. In the process, he plugs into universals. Cliff Huxtable and his family were role models for all Americans. Color simply didn't fit into the equation. Hilton Lucas of ''Cosby'' is on the same track. It's a promising one.

COSBY
CBS, tonight at 8
(Channel 2 in New York)

Written by Dennis Klein and directed by John Whitesell. Produced by Carsey-Werner Productions in association with Bill Cosby. Mr. Cosby, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, Caryn Mandabach, Peter Tortorici, Dennis Klein and Norman Steinberg, executive producers.

WITH: Mr. Cosby (Hilton Lucas), Phylicia Rashad (Ruth Lucas), Madeline Kahn (Pauline), T'Keyah Crystal Keymah (Erica), Doug E. Doug (Griffin), Sean Whalen (Cleaner) and Foster Brooks (Dom).

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

COS AND DEFECTS
TRYING TO RECAPTURE HIS AUDIENCE, BILL COSBY REUNITES WITH PHYLICIA RASHAD FOR ANOTHER SITCOM. BUT TURNING HIMSELF INTO A CHRONIC CRANK CREATES A COMEDY OF ERRORS.

By Ken Tucker

Few beloved entertainers have as slippery a grasp on why the public likes them as Bill Cosby, to judge from his new sitcom, COSBY (CBS, Mondays, 8-8:30 p.m.). This time he plays Hilton Lucas, a 60-year-old airline worker recently laid off after 30 years on the job. Hilton is upset and angry about getting the heave-ho, and he takes it out on everyone around him, especially his wife, Ruthie, played by former Cosby Show costar Phylicia Rashad.

As Cliff and Claire Huxtable in the immensely popular Cosby Show (1984-92), Cosby and Rashad teamed up as a husband and wife presiding over a boisterous brood. We appreciated the funny ways they found to be long-suffering, patient parents, always loving but often amusingly exasperated.

By contrast, Hilton and Ruthie live alone in a little house in Queens, New York. (Their grown, law-school-graduate daughter, Erica, played by In Living Color's lively T'Keyah Crystal Keymah, has her own place.) Losing his job has turned Hilton against the world, and as the series begins, Ruthie is already wishing that her husband would stop hanging around the house, moping and griping. When Hilton goes on an errand, such as to pick up the cleaning, he gets into an argument with the clerk over a stain on his pants, then stalks home to fume at Ruthie over the ''stupid'' kid he just dressed down.

Doesn't sound like a laugh riot, does it? In attempting an American retooling of the British sitcom One Foot in the Grave, Cosby has lost his bearings. Where's the beguilingly goofy guy from The Cosby Show, the smiling father figure from all those Jell-O commercials, the dignified cool cat from I Spy? Gone, gone. Instead, we get the poker-faced grump who presided over the disastrous 1992-93 game-show revival of You Bet Your Life.

Cosby is certainly interesting looking: It has what must be the most elaborate set of any current sitcom. The action flows from the Lucases' living room out the front door onto a meticulously detailed street, with cars and stores and numerous passersby; in the first three episodes, we also see their backyard and attic. There are a lot of interesting places for comedy to occur, but it seldom does.

There's also a slackness to the writing that's remarkable for a performer of Cosby's caliber. Here's a typical too-long, too-lame joke: ''The day they let me go,'' says Hilton, ''10,000 other people were let go. The last time a crowd that size was going anywhere, Moses was in front of 'em.'' Add to this a disconcerting tendency to have Hilton make fun of people because they're ''stupid,'' elderly (it's weird to have a 60-year-old belittling people older than himself for being enfeebled), or foreign (in one episode, a Spanish-speaking man and a Scottish fellow meet with Hilton's scorn: ''This is English?'' he sneers at their accents).

Cosby does have a couple of costars in its favor. One is the endlessly charming Doug E. Doug, who starred in the underrated 1992-93 sitcom Where I Live and here plays Hilton's daughter's neighbor. The other is Madeline Kahn as Ruthie's best friend, Pauline. Kahn gives her dull lines bright, off-kilter readings. Oddly enough, Hilton and Pauline's relationship -- wary, but a little flirty -- is more interesting than Hilton and Ruthie's; Rashad comes off merely tired and fed up.

Cosby may have been going for his own version of All in the Family with this show, and an African-American Archie Bunker would indeed be something to watch -- to feel, perhaps, the sting of inverted bigotry. But Family's scripts were good old-fashioned gut busters. Bill Cosby clearly wants us to laugh at Hilton's sourness, and he pulls off an impressive amount of physical comedy each week. Yet he's refusing to give us the primary pleasure of a good sitcom: a vivid character endlessly revealing different sides of himself. Instead, his Hilton Lucas is a one-note whiner. C-

An Article from The Virginia Pilot

TV: THE NEW FALL SEASON THE NETWORKS' BIG GAMBLE: WILL BIG BUCKS FOR BIG STARS PAY OFF WITH BIG HITS?<
BILL COSBY HATES IT when he's described as the man who will save CBS.

He does not like to be reminded that CBS is paying him in the neighborhood of $20 million to stop the slide - NBC, ABC and Fox had better ratings among 18- to 49-year-olds last season - and restore the shine to what was once the Tiffany network.

When addressing TV writers not long ago, Cosby said he feels the pressure of a batter who has come to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded and his team trailing by three runs.

``All I'm asking is that they let me swing the bat. I'm not predicting that my show will be a hit - be No. 1 - and save the network.''

But, if not Cosby, who will save CBS? Ted Danson, another old hand brought into the CBS family this season? Scott Bakula? Rhea Perlman? Gerald McRaney? They're also on the CBS payroll this season.

Make no mistake about it, couch commandoes, CBS expects ``Cosby'' on Monday night at 8 to win its time period. And deliver a large audience to the 8:30 sitcom (``Ink,'' co-starring Danson and Mary Steenburgen), breathe new life into the Monday night comedy lineup that includes ``Murphy Brown'' and ``Cybill,'' and help make the night into part of the foundation on which the network will build a bright new future.

CBS guaranteed Cosby 44 weeks of work, an unprecedented commitment in network television.

``Bill Cosby did not come cheap,'' said CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves. ``We're looking for his show to explode, to help make it a blockbuster night for CBS.''

Take your best swing, Bill.

It was back to the drawing board for Moonves after last season when 10 of 11 new CBS shows crashed and burned. Only ``Almost Perfect'' survived, and that's undergoing a makeover.

This season, CBS is saying ``welcome home'' to mature viewers with series in which old reliables Cosby, Danson, Perlman, Bakula, McRaney, Peter Strauss and Phylicia Rashad star.

Rashad again plays Cosby's TV spouse.

That's an obvious trend this season - giving marquee TV names another go around. CBS is doing it big time.

So is ABC.

After losing much of its 18-to 49- and 25- to 54-year-old audience to No. 1 NBC, ABC moved to bring back the baby boomers and some of the Generation X crowd.

Michael J. Fox stars in ``Spin City.'' Molly Ringwald returns from self-imposed exile in France to head the cast of ``Townies.'' Melissa Joan Hart, a household name among teens since she was Clarissa on Nickelodeon, stars for ABC in ``Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.''

``I hope to continue doing other things - movies and stuff - but I realize that doing television is what I love,'' said Fox. ``And the idea of a regular job sounds good.'' His movie career is lost in the Hollywood backwash.

Of the 26 new comedies and 14 dramas among the new shows, the best timeslot - at 9:30 p.m. Thursday between ``Seinfeld'' and ``ER'' on NBC - goes to Brooke Shields' sitcom, ``Suddenly Susan.'' Lucky girl.

NBC is bringing back Justine Bateman - she played Fox's sister on ``Family Ties'' - in the sitcom, ``Men Behaving Badly.'' Mel Harris of ``thirtysomething'' also is working for NBC in ``Something So Right.'' UPN revived the careers of Sherman Hemsley in ``Goode Behavior'' and Malcolm-Jamal Warner in ``Malcolm & Eddie.''

Bateman says she's had plenty of opportunities to work in TV after ``Family Ties'' but resisted until now.

``This show feels right,'' she said.

Another trend: Stand-up comics continue to impress network programmers. Joining Jerry Seinfeld, Brett Butler, Paul Reiser, Drew Carey and others too numerous to mention are the following comics in new sitcoms:

Ray Romano, ``Everybody Loves Raymond,'' CBS; Jeff Foxworthy, ``The Jeff Foxworthy Show,'' NBC; Steve Harvey, ``The Steve Harvey Show,'' Warner Brothers; Jamie Foxx, ``The Jamie Foxx Show,'' Warner Brothers; Lisa Ann Walter, ``Life's Work,'' ABC; Greg Giraldo, ``Common Law,'' ABC; Tom Rhodes, ``Mr. Rhodes,'' NBC; Eddie Griffin, ``Malcolm and Eddie,'' UPN, and Flex, ``Homeboys in Outer Space,'' UPN.

Romano, a protege of David Letterman, said it's a kick just to see his name on a network sitcom. ``The scariest thing for me now is learning how to act in a sitcom. It's a lot scarier than doing stand-up comedy.''

Last season, the network schedules were overloaded with clones of ``Friends.'' This year, the tendency is to do shows in classrooms.

There's the drama, ``Dangerous Minds,'' with Annie Potts on ABC. And the sitcoms ``Mr. Rhodes'' on NBC, ``Something So Right'' on NBC, ``Nick Freno, Licensed Teacher'' on Warner Brothers and ``The Steve Harvey Show'' on Warner Brothers.

Being imitated widely is Fox's ``The X-Files.''

The new dramas picking up the theme of shadowy and spooky stories are ``Dark Skies,'' ``The Pretender'' and ``Profiler'' on NBC's Saturday night lineup, ``Early Edition'' on CBS, ``Millennium'' on Fox and ``The Burning Zone'' on UPN.

Minor trend: New TV shows inspired by movies. There's ``Clueless'' and ``Dangerous Minds'' on ABC; ``Pearl'' from the script of ``Educating Rita,'' on CBS; and ``Party Girl'' on Fox.

Put ``Clueless'' and ``Party Girl'' in the category of shows about impossibly shallow but cute babes. Toss ``Lush Life'' from Fox in that pot, too.

One more trend for the 1996-97 season: A new life for shows that were tossed overboard by another network.

Foxworthy's sitcom now has a home on NBC. ``In the House'' was rescued from the NBC ``on hiatus'' file by UPN. ``Jag'' will be moving from NBC to CBS at midseason and another show eased off the NBC schedule, ``Brotherly Love,'' lives on with Warner Brothers.

Foxworthy thought his career in network TV was as dead as road kill when ABC dropped his show. Then NBC called.

``I learned from the ABC show what worked and didn't work for me,'' he said. ``I learned that I appeal to the blue-collar guy and not the guy sitting next to his pool in Palm Springs.''

What are the best new shows of the 1996-97 season? The worst? Read on.

BEST NEW SITCOM - ``Men Behaving Badly.'' Rob Schneider of ``Saturday Night Live'' plays a likable slob sharing bachelor digs with Ron Eldard of ``ER.'' From hitmakers Carsey-Werner. Wednesdays on NBC at 9:30 p.m.

WORST NEW SITCOM - ``Home-boys in Outer Space'' on UPN Tuesday nights at 8:30. In the 23rd century, will they be using such phrases as, ``Do you dig it?''? Beam this show to Venus, Scotty.

BEST NEW DRAMA - ``Millennium'' on Fox Fridays at 9 p.m. It's from the creator of ``The X-Files.'' Lance Henriksen plays an ex-FBI agent who gets into the minds of evildoers. It's dark, well-crafted, compelling.

WORST NEW DRAMA - ``EZ Streets,'' Wednesday night at 10 on CBS. This is a confusing, dreary piece of work about cops in league with the underworld. There's nobody to root for in the large cast lost in a hard-to-follow story.

An Article from The New York Times

A Young Comic On Cosby's Turf

By LAWRIE MIFFLIN
Published: November 17, 1996

LAST SUMMER, WHEN the producers of Bill Cosby's new sitcom, ''Cosby,'' offered Doug E. Doug a major role in the CBS series, the young man accepted without qualms. A stand-up comedian who starred in the popular Disney movie ''Cool Runnings'' in 1993 and briefly had a sitcom himself that year, he felt more than ready to hold his own in prime time.

Then he was invited to Mr. Cosby's Manhattan home for a chat.

''It was a get-to-know-you meeting,'' the 26-year-old comedian recalled recently, ''but for me, it became a babble-and-slobber meeting. Why? Because Bill Cosby is my primary creative influence.''

Doug E. Doug, whose real name is Douglas C. Bourne Jr., grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and still lives there. He was only 17 years old, still a student at Bishop Loughlin High School, when he began appearing as a stand-up. His stage name comes from those days.

''I was a kid, sort of like everyone's little brother in the clubs,'' he said. ''An emcee, a guy called Mel Stanley the Comedy Cop, used to call me Dougie Dougie, and I just liked it and decided to use it.''

Doug E. Doug can be hyperkinetic on screen, but he was languid and reflective during a conversation the other day on the set of ''Cosby,'' at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. He lounged on the floor, leaning against a cushion, absentmindedly twisting the coils of his African-locked hair around one finger.

As a child, he loved the animated television show ''Fat Albert,'' which was based on a character from a Cosby routine. He also listened to Mr. Cosby's comedy albums. ''What I understood I laughed at, and what I didn't understand I still laughed at,'' he said. ''I wanted to be just like him, and be able to make people laugh even at stuff they didn't quite understand.''

That is still a goal, but one among several. Doug E. Doug sees himself with three professional identities: comedian, actor and director. Once or twice a month, he is flying to Los Angeles to edit ''Citizen James,'' his first film as a director. It's a low-budget production, without a distributor so far.

For now, his primary work is as an apprentice to a master of the sitcom trade. ''Cosby,'' seen Monday nights at 8, revolves around Mr. Cosby's character, the curmudgeonly Hilton Lucas, who has lost his job as an airline worker and makes life difficult for his wife, Ruth (Phylicia Rashad), their daughter, Erica (T'Keyah Crystal Keymah), and assorted shopkeepers and neighbors. Doug E. Doug plays Griffin, a small-time entrepreneur in cockeyed pursuit of schemes that will make him rich. He lives in the same apartment building as Erica, whom he adores. The crush is not mutual, and the sweetly loopy Griffin tries to win her affection by cozying up to her dad.

In the episode tomorrow night, Griffin takes Hilton to a basketball game, where the older man wins the chance to come back a week later and try a shot from midcourt that could win him a million dollars.

''We're gonna be millionaires!'' Griffin exults, back at the Lucas home.

''We? When did I become a we?'' Hilton demands.

''We became a we when I bought the tickets,'' Griffin retorts, with a bug-eyed look that conveys not surprise but defiance.

The subtlety Doug E. Doug brings to a role that could easily be played as caricature has impressed another master comedian on the show: Madeline Kahn, who plays Ruth Lucas's best friend, Pauline.

''He is obviously an excellent comic actor,'' Ms. Kahn said of Doug E. Doug. ''But what sets him apart is that he has a certain refinement and elegance. This innate sense of dignity, or elegance, brings another dimension to his character and suggests that if Griffin had other opportunities in life, there's no telling how far he might go.''

That is something Mr. Cosby has worked on, pushing the young comedian to find the right personality for his character. ''Griffin represents the young person in society who knows what he wants to say and has an idea what he wants to be but can't quite grasp it; society slides away from him,'' Mr. Cosby said. ''Doug E. makes people laugh, but it's more than that. He blows life into Griffin; he is an actor.''

Doug E. Doug says he has been learning from Ms. Kahn as well as Mr. Cosby. ''I think I'm more spontaneous, more like Mr. C., but I've learned from Madeline that there are some things you can formulate,'' he said. ''Meaning it in a very positive sense, she's very staged. I wish I'd met her before 'That Darn Cat!' because I could have used some of what she's taught me.''

''That Darn Cat!,'' due in February, is a remake of the 1965 Disney movie. In the new film, Doug E. Doug plays a rookie F.B.I. agent. His first movie role was in Spike Lee's ''Mo' Better Blues'' (1990). That led to several other parts, but he was most memorable in ''Cool Runnings,'' the comedy about a Jamaican bobsled team that makes it to the Olympics. As Sanka Coffie, a happy-go-lucky pushcart racer who is dragooned into the bobsled adventure, Doug E. Doug created a character both goofy and smart, and Sanka's hunched shoulders, wide eyes and jutting chin have fit into the ''Cosby'' role.

Doug E. Doug's first television role was on the ABC sitcom ''Where I Live,'' playing the central character, a 17-year-old Harlem resident. That show had a brief life, and he said the experience taught him that prime-time television hates to take risks. ''Young artists should get six-show commitments and have the opportunity to do what it is they do,'' he said.

Film, he said, offers ''an environment that's more open to innovation.'' ''Citizen James'' is about three young men in Bedford-Stuyvesant who set out to make a movie, with no money and no real understanding of what it takes.

DOUG E. DOUG STILL performs occasionally in New York comedy clubs, to stay in touch with that world. And he insists he is serious about eventually taking on yet another profession: teaching elementary school.

''Elementary and high school kids, they're my fan base, my friends,'' he said. ''I talk to them about the importance of education, but also about other things. Like how I remember being rambunctious in school, and a teacher telling me 'You are funny, but this is not the place.' That's become a favorite slogan of mine: 'This is not the place.' And I tell kids, if someone gets in the way of your education, you have every right to say, 'This is not the place.' ''

An Article from The Desert News

CBS cancels 'Cosby'
Published: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 12:00 a.m. MST

By Scott D. Pierce Deseret News television editor

"Cosby," the show that was supposed to be the linchpin around which CBS built its schedule, has been canceled by the network after four rather disappointing seasons on the air.

Certainly the show never came anywhere near the success of the 1984-92 NBC sitcom "The Cosby Show," which rocketed to the top of the ratings and was the No. 1 show on TV for five seasons.When new CBS president Leslie Moonves signed Cosby in 1996, it was considered somewhat of a coup. The network was in deep ratings trouble and it signaled a turnaround in the Big Eye's fortunes. And that remained something Moonves remained grateful for even after three years of declining ratings and a decision a year ago to move the show from Monday to Wednesday.

"Bill Cosby absolutely was the centerpiece of our rebuild," Moonves said.

The show was a moderate success on Mondays, but ratings fell after leaving Mondays for Wednesdays and then Fridays, down from about 16 million viewers per week in 1996-97 to about 9 million per week in the current season.

The show is scheduled to air its last original episode on Friday, April 28.

Cosby will develop other projects for CBS. The fate of his show "Kids Say the Darndest Things" remains to be determined.

Here's Madeline Kahn's Obituary from BBC News

Saturday, 4 December, 1999, 01:30 GMT
Actress loses cancer battle
The actress had been battling the disease for more than a year

Madeline Kahn, an Oscar-nominated actress and comedian best known for her work in the films Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, has died of ovarian cancer.

Ms Kahn, 57, first acknowledged her illness publicly last month, saying she was undergoing "aggressive treatment".

She is one of the most talented people that ever lived

Mel Brooks
Her husband John Hansbury said: "Madeline was a performer of brilliance and a loyal and trusted friend to everyone she encountered.

"While we mourn her passing, we celebrate a full and wonderful life."

Ms Kahn made her film debut in Kiss Me Kate in 1965.

She was nominated for best supporting actress Academy Awards two years in a row: for her portrayal of a floozy named Trixie Delight in the 1973 film Paper Moon and for her role as a saloon singer in Blazing Saddles, in 1974.

She won a Tony Award for best actress in 1993 with her role as ditsy Jewish matron Gorgeous Teitelbaum in The Sisters Rosensweig.

She was nominated for a Tony three other times: for In the Boom Boom Room in 1973; On the 20th Century in 1978; and Born Yesterday in 1989.

In addition to Blazing Saddles, Ms Kahn also appeared in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety.

She had most recently taken on the part of Pauline, a neighbour on the TV show Cosby.

She was born in Boston, and graduated from Hofstra University on Long Island on a drama scholarship.

She was also trained as an opera singer.

'Fighting spirit'

In Blazing Saddles, Ms Kahn used her classically trained voice in her amusing portrayal of a singer in the Wild West who helps Gene Wilder foil Brooks' evil plan to do away with the new sheriff in town.

"She is one of the most talented people that ever lived," Brooks once said.

"I mean, either in stand-up comedy, or acting, or whatever you want, you can't beat Madeline Kahn."

When announcing her battle with ovarian cancer, Ms. Kahn said she wanted her to inform others about the illness.

"It is my hope that I might raise awareness of this awful disease and hasten the day that an effective test can be discovered to give women a fighting chance to catch this cancer in its earliest stage," she said.

To watch some clips from Cosby go to http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cosby+1996+tv+show&aq=f

To go to the Official Website of Bill Cosby go to http://www.billcosby.com/

For The Madeline Kahn Page go to http://mkahnfan.tripod.com/