Pilot (Cosby Show)
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"Pilot" was the pilot episode of The Cosby Show. The episode aired on September 20, 1984, and introduced the Huxtable family to viewers.
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[edit] Plot Summary
Claire Huxtable and her children are having dinner at home. Claire is upset with Theo due to the poor grades on his recent report cards. His younger sister Vanessa was trying to get Theo in trouble as well. Cliff Huxtable comes home from a long day at his job as an obstetrician/gynecologist just after the meal, and Claire asks him why they had four children, to which Cliff replied because they didn't want to have five.
Cliff confronts Theo about his poor grades and asks how he plans to get into college with such grades. When Theo replies that he's not, Cliff replies "Damn right." Theo explains that he just plans to get a job after school as a regular person. Cliff uses play money from a Monopoly game to show just how far a "regular person"'s income would actually go in the real world.
Theo responds that he should accept his son's weaknesses and love him unconditionally because they are father and son—a typical sentimental idiom in family sitcoms of that time, and one which generated the typical applause from the studio audience. Cliff, however, to the audience's surprise and amused approval, immediately and angrily calls this sentiment "the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life," completely rejecting the notion that loving his son means he must quietly and willingly accept it when the boy does not give his best effort in school, and famously threatened him with the often quoted line, "I brought you in this world, and I'll take you out." Cliff then tells his son that he expects him to work to his potential.
Cliff also meets Denise's boyfriend, who had recently been in a Turkish prison. When Cliff tells his daughter about what time he expects her home, she scoffs at the notion since it is a Friday night and thus, "not a school night." Cliff responds by asking her if she went to school that day and that it was a "school night."
[edit] Inconsistencies
- The set used for the pilot episode of The Cosby Show was notably different than the one used during the remainder of the series.
- In the pilot, Cliff and Clair Huxtable have only four children. The fifth daughter, Sondra - who was the eldest child - was not introduced until later in the first season. Her being away at college is the reason given for her absence in the earlier part of the season.
[edit] Trivia
- The scene where Cliff confronts Theo about his poor grades would be shown in a flashback in the series finale "And So We Commence", in which amongst other things Theo graduated from college.
- The pilot episode is one of the few episodes where profanity of any sort was used. Even by the standards of the 1980s and early 1990s the show had very little profanity.
