THE COSBY SHOW DVD BOX SETS

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The Cosby Show is an American television situation comedy starring Bill Cosby, first airing on September 20, 1984 and running for eight seasons on the NBC television network, until April 30, 1992. The show focused on the Huxtable family, an upper-middle class African-American family living in Brooklyn, New York.

According to TV Guide, the show "was TV's biggest hit in the 1980s, and almost single-handedly revived the sitcom genre and NBC's ratings fortunes". Originally, the show had been pitched to ABC, which rejected it. Entertainment Weekly stated that The Cosby Show helped to make possible a larger variety of shows based on African Americans, from In Living Color to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The Cosby Show was also one of the first successful sitcoms based on the subject matter of a standup comedian_s act, blazing a trail for other such successful programs as Roseanne, Home Improvement, The Drew Carey Show, Seinfeld, and Everybody Loves Raymond. The Cosby Show along with All in the Family are the only two American programs that have been #1 in the Nielsen Ratings for five consecutive seasons. The show spawned the successful spin-off A Different World.

Having aired for 201 episodes, The Cosby Show is the third-longest running U.S. comedy with a predominantly African-American cast, surpassed only by The Jeffersons and Family Matters.

The show focused on the Huxtable family, an upper-middle class African-American family living in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, New York, at 10 Stigwood Avenue. The patriarch was Heathcliff "Cliff" Huxtable, an obstetrician. The matriarch was his wife, attorney Clair (Hanks) Huxtable. Despite its comedic subject, the show sometimes involved serious subjects, such as son Theo's experiences of dealing with dyslexia, which was based on Cosby's real-life child Ennis, who was dyslexic.

Cosby had an unusually high level of creative control over the show. He wanted the program to be educational, reflecting his own background in education. He also insisted that the program be taped in New York City rather than Los Angeles, where most television programs were taped.