Malcolm-Jamal Warner RIP
By 
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” in the mid-1980s, died in Costa Rica on Sunday. He was 54.
Warner drowned while swimming at a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, The Associated Press reported, citing the country’s Judicial Investigation Department.
“The Cosby Show,” which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1992, was a must-see-TV cultural touchstone whose final episode was covered as front-page news in The New York Times. That article began: “Theo Huxtable graduated from N.Y.U. yesterday, albeit on videotape, and like a lot of graduations it was a bittersweet occasion.”
Warner, who was 21 at the time, had played the role of the Huxtables’ middle child and only son since he was 13. The show’s portrayal of an upper-middle-class Black family — Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad played a doctor and a lawyer raising children in a Brooklyn townhouse — was celebrated as an overdue corrective against harmful stereotypes on television.
Of course because Bill Cosby is a scumbag, the show is largely not watched anymore. But that had nothing to do with either Lisa Bonet or Malcolm Jamal-Warner, both of whom became and remain serious icons for my generation. I know it was hard for Jamal-Warner to deal with all the stuff about Cosby (I doubt Bonet was so surprised and in fact, I know a Black woman who was around the comedy circuits when Cosby was young and who told me the women all told each other to say away from that creep), but he had a good career on his own over the last thirty years. He came through being a child actor as an evidently pretty normal person, which isn’t easy.
Questlove has a good memorial for Jamal-Warner as well and what he meant to a young Black man.
Also, stay out of the ocean. It’s not human habitat. It wants to kill you. And it will.