Dismayed at your saggy pants and even saggier morals, deposed TV dad Bill Cosby wants to restore a sense of old-fashioned family values to comedy, which are those things we had before they finally invented smartphones. He already has his first standup special in 30 years coming to Comedy Central, and now he tells Yahoo TV he’d like to continue that trajectory by developing another family sitcom and even rebooting Fat Albert. He’s partnered with Cosby Show producer Tom Werner on the former, developing a comedy he says would satisfy the viewers’ desires for “a married couple that acts like they love each other, warts and all, children who respect the parenting, and the comedy of people who make mistakes… warmth and forgiveness” as an answer to today’s sitcoms, which are primarily about people having sex with computers and arson.
However, it wouldn’t be Cosby Show Redux: “It's not like little children sitting around, it's like a 28-year-old with the mother, a 28-year-old son taking his father somewhere,” Cosby said of this show based entirely on making his adult children feel guilty, apparently. There’s no network deal currently in place, but Cosby is confident “there is a viewership out there that wants to see comedy, and warmth, and love, and surprise, and cleverness, without going into the party attitude.” And they would surely welcome the respite from those “party attitude” shows, where problems are resolved by sunglasses-wearing dogs rolling in on skateboards. (Real people solve their problems through elaborate lip-synching routines to old R&B songs.)
Yet the latter will be Fat Albert Redux, as Cosby has teamed with his old Cosby producer Tom Straw to develop a modern, yet faithful version of the cartoon in which an obese teenager and his Junkyard Gang deal in teachable moments and tetanus. “It's got to be animated, every bit of it. Maybe except for yours truly saying, 'I told you this is going to be funny, and if you pay attention, you just might learn something,’” Cosby said, repeating the line that, in members of a certain generation, inspires a Pavlovian response to sit quietly and get ready to chuckle about child abuse.
Like Cosby’s family sitcom, Fat Albert doesn’t yet have a home, but it’s expected to find one as soon as Cosby sits a network down, hands it a stack of Monopoly money, and walks it through a year of being a “regular network” without Bill Cosby.