I really liked ‘the cosby show’. it was a significant change in the demonstration of a successful, minority family. its funny. it also holds up well; the writing did not date itself too much to the era.
but, ya know… Cosby. can you separate the artist from the art? a part of me feels like i should still be able to enjoy the show even though he is a terrible person.
thoughts?
Pirate it.
The only important concern about consuming the work of a douchebag is them gaining from it.
Now, you may or may not be able to ignore the person having done shitty things, it might break your enjoyment of it. That tends to be more of a problem with actors and comedians because you see them, rather than their work.
Seriously, the idea that a given body of work is somehow bad because the person or persons that made it are bad is bullshit.
Cosby is a harder because a lot of his comedy, and the show, were based on him, portraying himself as this decent, fatherly, nice person. Him being a douche the entire time, knowing what we know now, it can be dissonant to see him being a dad, or joking about his wife. Someone like Louis CK, he was never portrayed as some kind of paragon, so it’s easy to just enjoy his work as it is since there’s no “wait a minute” inherent to his performance. You might still have trouble not picturing him being a creep with his dick in his hand, but the jokes aren’t him pretending to be some upright, moral human.
Art and artist are always separate when piracy is an option.
What sucks about that is a lot of lesser known actors probably rely on the residuals more than cosby.