Malcolm-Jamal Warner was more than Theo. He was a blueprint for dignity

I’m a day late on this, but this is one celebrity death that hits hard. This sucks both for who he was, and for how he died. Malcolm Jamal-Warner rose to fame as Theo on The Cosby Show.

I won’t lie, The Cosby Show has been a bit tainted for me, every since the despicable deeds of Bill Cosby came to light. It’s hard to watch Bill Cosby playing wise and lovable Cliff Huxtable now and not think about what we know he was doing in real life But the legacy of the show, what it meant to American society, is still important.

I grew up on The Cosby Show, I watched it from the beginning until the end. One thing that always struck was how the show managed to come full circle in one specific way. In the premier episode, there was ascene between Cliff and Theo where Theo explains how he has no plan to go to college, he’s just going to slide through high school and then get some job like a “regular person,” and so Cliff gives him an impromptu economic lesson about what kind of life Theo can expect to have like that.

And then 8 years later, in the final episode of the series, Theo graduated from college. In hindsight that was a perfect ending. In the intervening years we watched as Theo grew from a lazy teenager to a responsible educated young man.

Even if Malcolm Jamal-Warner had never acting again after, his place in TV history was secure. And thus his death feels like a death in the family.

But dying but drowning, that also sucks. That is one of my worst nightmares. I’m not kidding, I never learned how to swim because of this. I got scared by watching the movie JAWS when I was little kid, and therefore never wanted to go in the water. This is a horrible way for him to go, and I feel so bad for his family and friends. R.I.P. Malcolm.