Nostalgic recollections of The Cosby Show place Cliff Huxtable—Cosby’s duck-walking, sandwich-loving, mugging alter ego—as the smiling patriarch of a well-adjusted nuclear family with two professional incomes in a Brooklyn brownstone barricaded away from the first stirrings of the crack era. It was gently political: “There were no “whitey” call-outs à la George Jefferson, no power-to-the-people pronouncements—just an upscale black family trying to keep it together.

Normalcy itself was the message: “All I ever wanted was ... to take the house back,” Cosby told The Root in a recent interview. “I just wanted … to show people that this is parenting, this is home, and this is deep.”

Throughout the series’ eight-year run, Huxtable-style parenting meant making a tough-love case for responsibility and self-development—delivered with a mix of humor and stern incredulity. Witness the pilot, when Theo makes an impassioned defense for mediocrity and the right to be a “regular person.” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Cliff snaps. “You are going to try as hard as you can—because I said so.”

A somewhat grouchy, slightly punitive approach has characterized much of Cosby's output, both personal and professional, for years. Behind the scenes, The Cosby Show was a carefully calibrated treatise on race and “positivity,” says Alvin Poussaint, the Harvard psychologist, longtime collaborator and close friend of Cosby’s.

“We wanted to show black people not in a buffoonish way,” he says. “We didn’t want any stereotypic humor.” Poussaint served as a consultant to every script of the show, and recalls a scene in which Cliff’s daughter, Rudy, is having her hair combed by her mother, Clair. “Rudy was crying bloody murder,” Poussaint says. “And I said, ‘I don’t think we should be reinforcing the idea of black girl’s hair as being difficult and nappy without anything positive being said about it.’” The white producers of the show, he says, didn’t see what all the fuss was about. After some heated back and forth, the entire scene was scrapped.

As a result of this race-conscious script-parsing, the show helped to change cultural perceptions of black Americans among a mixed-race audience. Instead of loud hair-brushing scenes, the Huxtables took a road less traveled. “We went straight at them,” Cosby told The Root. “We went at them with visual art, we went at them with music; we went with James Brown, B.B. King, Stevie Wonder.” These backstage efforts to enact a social agenda may be the most enduring legacy of the Huxtable saga. White families watched the show into the No. 1 slot on TV. Cosby recalls black women coming up to him, saying, “Thank you for showing my boyfriend what to do with my feet when I come home.” And he credits A Different World, the 1987 spinoff that depicted life at a historically black college, for increasing rates of enrollment at these schools.

But in the aftermath of The Cosby Show, which ended in 1992, Bill Cosby’s politics moved from on-screen to real life.