Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:
You could say all of this in another way: Theo Huxtable was a nicely realized character but also a lofty ideal. What he meant was too much for any real person to carry around. Malcolm-Jamal Warner seemed miraculously able to pull it off. He’d been famous and highly visible at an alarmingly young age, but, unlike many other former child stars, he never seemed to feel much rancor about the experience, or resentment about lugging pure-minded Theo around with him for the rest of his life.
When he played roles in shows like “Suits,” “The Resident,” and “Malcolm and Eddie,” you couldn’t help but think about Theo. But that wasn’t a bad thing: it only meant that the archetype that the earlier character had prodded into being was now commonplace in all kinds of representations of reality—that Theo had done the impossibly difficult cultural work of affixing a face upon a new, then suddenly ubiquitous, kind of person.
Warner helped this process along by always comporting himself with an ambassadorial cheer. He knew what he meant. One of “The Cosby Show” ’s unspoken assertions—now much more controversial than in the eighties, when the show premièred—was that polished personal presentation was part of a Black man’s arsenal of tools to survive an unpredictable world.
more here.
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