THE BILL COSBY SHOW debuted on NBC about one year after Cos' first hit show, I SPY, left the airwaves. It was Cosby's first sitcom, and he starred as Chet Kincaid, a P.E. teacher and basketball coach at an inner-city Los Angeles high school. Shout Factory has just released the first season on DVD, which is the first time that hardly anybody has seen it in decades. THE BILL COSBY SHOW ran only two seasons, and has barely been rerun on television at least since the 1980s, when it aired on the little-seen CBN cable network.

THE BILL COSBY SHOW is an interesting little series and would never get on the air today. One way in which it was ahead of its time is the absence of a laugh track. Cosby claims that was a constant source of disagreement between him and NBC--a disagreement that eventually led to the series' premature cancellation. It's relatively common to see sitcoms without laugh tracks today (THE OFFICE, MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, ENTOURAGE...), but I doubt if any were doing it fulltime in 1969, when THE BILL COSBY SHOW debuted (it ran until May 1971). THE MONKEES occasionally went without a laugh track, and MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT may not have had one either.

What really differentiates the show from today's sitcoms is that there are no jokes. Or few jokes. The setup/punchline format of today's shows (the punchline almost always being either an insult or a sexual reference) make THE BILL COSBY SHOW seem either fresh or quaint, I'm not sure which. All of the comedy comes out of the characters, and it's a gentle comedy with no insults or coarseness. Much of it comes from Cosby's nightclub routines, and the constant hamming and funny faces and voices often blurs the line between comic and character.

In the pilot episode, surprisingly directed by action veteran Harvey Hart (I don't recall Hart ever doing sitcom work), Kincaid is out for a Saturday jog and passes a corner telephone booth (remember those?). The phone rings and he answers. It's a woman asking to speak to her husband, Calvin (Vic Tayback!), who works at the garage across the street. Could Chet please call him to the phone? Kincaid's exasperated efforts at doing favors for strangers slowly build until he eventually finds himself sitting in a police interrogation room, accused of a robbery.

Other shows find Chet fighting school bureaucracy to order a tiny needle valve so he can pump up basketballs (the great Jay Sandrich directed this one) and Chet reluctantly dealing with an unexpected houseguest, an 8-year-old girl who refuses to speak. In another, Chet is asked to fill in for a sick algebra teacher, but unfortunately is not up on his math skills. These are all very simple story ideas, sort of if a bunch of writers came up with one-line concepts and threw them into a hat. A major problem with today's sitcoms is that the plots are often needlessly complicated (they're trying to ripoff SEINFELD). All Bill Cosby needed was a simple concept, and he was off. There are admittedly few heavy bellylaughs in THE BILL COSBY SHOW, but the chuckle-per-minute ratio is pretty high.

Also interesting is the number of minority actors seen on the show, not just out front, but as extras and bit players. Many of the students seen in the classrooms and hallways are Asian and black, and race seems never to be a major topic. Cosby was the first black actor to ever star in a dramatic TV series (I SPY premiered in 1965), and he was the first black actor to star in a sitcom since AMOS & ANDY was pushed off the air in the early 1950s. He did his pioneering by not calling attention to his race. Cosby-as-Kincaid wore dashikis and counseled poor black children, but he did so quietly with great humor and grace.

THE BILL COSBY SHOW, judging from just six of its 52 episodes, is not a great comedy nor is it among its star's greatest accomplishments. But it's warm, entertaining and fun.

Plus, THE BILL COSBY SHOW has a kickass theme composed by Quincy Jones and scat-sung (in purposely silly, rambling lyrics) by Cosby.

I remember one episode where he's got a date but there's something wrong with his car, so he borrows a buddy's garbage truck. To take her out. He can't figure out all the controls, so shows up at her house with the back end raising and lowering, raising and lowering. I believe there were some smiles as he finessed this inconvenience with her. The set sounds like it'll be a happy revisit.

I believe I saw more eps. of Cosby's first sitcom than I did of his later, more famous (and popular) one. I think I saw about three or four of the former and maybe one of the latter.

The one episode I remember was about a white kid on the basketball team who has a foul mouth and kept cursing, as revealed by all the bleeps in his dialogue, e.g., "Great *bleep-bleep*-in' game!" Cosby, the coach, calls in the boy's mom who insists his son would never use such "*bleep-bleep*-ing language." So Cosby guides him into substituting harmless words in places of curses for the big game. "Oh, fudge." And when he fouls, it's "Double Fudge!" To which the referee responds, "And a peanut brittle to you."

And in the same episode, IIRC, Cosby is breaking in one of the high school girls as his secretary. And the running gag is that she keeps pulling the paper out of the typewriter when she makes a mistake and at the end there's a mountain of crumpled-up paper next to the typing table.

It was cute.

I think I remember watching and liking this show as I remember the name Chet Kincaid but I don't remember one single episode...

I picked up this set and have liked it so far, but I must admit the ad on it for THE ELECTRIC COMPANY has made me want to check that one out -- I remember Morgan Freeman being on it, but I don't remember Cosby's participation...how often was he on ELECTRIC COMPANY?

Funny, about all I recall about THE ELECTRIC COMPANY is Cosby's appearances. He was on it a lot, or his episodes were rerun more vigorously.

My son and I recently went through the whole ELECTRIC COMPANY set, and Bill Cosby is really incredible in his appearances. However, he was only involved for the first couple seasons. The set contains a few episodes from every season. The last two seasons were designed to be put on "repeat play", and it was these non-Cosby episodes that played on PBS for the last seven years of the show being on the air, up until the mid-eighties, over and over again. Although my son found something to like in just about all the episodes, I found the later seasons to be barely tolerable.

But the early stuff, with a tight cast of six (including Cosby and Freeman), are bursting with creativity, energy, raw talent, and intelligence. It still beats just about all other kids educational programming I've ever seen, with the exception of Mister Rogers (of course).