Celebrity deaths that are somehow connected to your childhood always hit a little harder. But, man, the news that Malcom-Jamal Warner drowned while on vacation in Costa Rica had an extra big wallop to it.
Part of it was the circumstances. Pretty much every person who reads this has been on a vacation with a loved one and gone for a swim. Thus while incredibly tragic, Warner’s death had an everyday quality to it.
Bigger was that Warner was one of the few heroes of my late childhood who was roughly my age.[1] Almost everything he was going through as Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show was stuff I was going through. Maybe his family had a little more money than mine. Perhaps he was a little cooler. Certainly he was more willing to make a fool of himself, especially when it came to trying to impress a girl, something I was mortified to do. But when he got emotional and his voice cracked because his sister messed up the shirt she was sewing for him or his parents dismissed his big ideas, all us other teenage dumbasses knew that pain.
My heroes in the early Eighties were mostly athletes, men who did superhuman feats I struggled to repeat in my backyard or on rec league fields and courts. Theo Huxtable was a hero not because he was an incredible athlete, but because he was putting all the ups and downs of being a teenage boy right there an the TV screen for all of America to see. These were universal concerns, and it was validating for them to be an integral part of the most-watched program in the country.
The Cosby Show has largely been erased from our culture, for understandable reasons. With that we’ve lost one of the most remarkable programs in TV history, one that broke down countless barriers without being edgy or radical or actively courting controversy. This was an upper-middle class Black family, living in comfort in an integrated neighborhood, that looked and acted pretty much just like the white families of the same backgrounds that had dominated prime time TV for 30 years. Especially for my generation, we saw that Black folks were just like us, no matter what our racist grandparents might think.[2] While that was all the vision of the now disgraced Bill Cosby, the actors who played his children were the ones who made the biggest impact on me. As the only boy in the house, Theo was the one I connected with the most.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner came from an era when a lot of child actors washed out – or worse – in one embarrassing way or another. He always seemed steady and comfortable with who he was and willing to find new avenues to stay in the entertainment business without flailing to find the same level of success and game he had as a teenager. He seemed like a genuinely good dude.
Here are two terrific pieces about Warner’s life.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner Wore the Gordon Gartrell Shirt Like No Other
Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the Other Side of the Climb