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" NBC has finally made a deal with Billy Cosby and his executive producer from the original Cosby Show for a new family comedy, according to Deadline and other sources. The specifics of the project haven&amp;#039;t been announced, but it sounds, from the logline, like a return to something very much like the old show. &amp;quot;They would like to see a married couple that acts like they love each other, warts and all, children who respect the parenting, and the comedy of people who make mistakes. Warmth and forgiveness,&amp;quot; Cosby told Yahoo TV. That sounds pretty much like what we all remember, of course, but that&amp;#039;s a good thing. Fatherhood has changed radically in the 20-plus years since The Cosby Show aired. What we desperately need is a new father figure on television who is as forward-looking and as progressive as Cosby was then. The Cosby Show, while seeming about as bland and innocuous as possible, was one of the most quietly subversive shows ever put on television. A fierce undercurrent of radicalism has always run under Cosby&amp;#039;s totally placid demeanor. Which is why mediocre comics make fun of him \u2014 the sweaters, the Pudding Pops, etc. \u2014 while great comics like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Dave Chappelle worship him. The Cosby Show portrayed a progressive reality for 1984, the year it premiered: a father actively involved in the raising of his children, a husband comfortable with his working wife, in a marriage with assumed equality between the partners, living in a multicultural neighborhood. They were the Modern Family before Modern Family, but what was even more radical was that they didn&amp;#039;t bother pointing out their modernity. The Cosby Show said, without saying it, that the progressive family was the height of normalcy.  The family has continued evolving, but the fathers on television \u2014 Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin and others \u2014 have not. The new reality is progressive, but the reflection of that reality in pop culture is not. A blog post spreading wildly this past week was from a male CEO who quit to spend more times with his kids. The whole thing is worth reading, but the opening spells out with enviable precision exactly the new situation so many men find themselves in, and how little it is discussed:  Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo&amp;#039;s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO. While the press haven&amp;#039;t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation: * I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever.\u2028* I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery.\u2028* I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience. Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don&amp;#039;t ask me.  This CEO is not atypical. We are at the beginning of a new fatherhood, rather than at the end. And the new reality is not just complicated, but it&amp;#039;s also largely unrecognized. The truly fascinating transformations of the modern family are not in the many new forms it has taken, but in the transformation in everyday lives. The original Cosby Show rode that line perfectly, the line between the familiar and the transformative. And Cosby&amp;#039;s bland radicalism is exactly what we need right now: a quietly progressive dad on TV. I don&amp;#039;t even care if he wears ugly sweaters and eats Pudding Pops. PLUS: Manifesto of the New Fatherhood &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29623/bill-cosby-return-to-tv/?dom=rls_rss&src=syn&mag=esq>