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" When Betty White hobbled back into our hearts during the 2010 Super Bowl and parlayed the nostalgia of a generation of ironists who spent spring break &amp;#039;99 watching a Golden Girls marathon with grammy into a Saturday Night Live hosting gig, the old lady role in a couple of mid-shelf rom coms, and two successful enough TV shows, network executives started to feel a strange tingling in the loins that had been dormant since Friends signed off. What if they no longer needed to scout improv shows for nascent comedic voices in their increasingly desperate fight against the stratification of television? What if they could skip building and aborting series for stand-ups who can sell out arenas but only manage human-adjacent facial expressions? Because, really, what&amp;#039;s the point in looking for &amp;quot;the next Seinfeld&amp;quot; when you can just make a show for the old Seinfeld? So they created an army of sitcoms around old guys who people used to like watching on TV. Mad About You star Paul Reiser&amp;#039;s The Paul Reiser Showwas canceled by NBC after two episodes. The Michael J. Fox Show was imprudently offered a full-season order by the same network and seems unlikely to return for a second run. Tim Allen has a show. Did you know that? Now Bill Cosby is returning to television to bum everyone out, the way Reiser and Allen bummed everyone out by starring on different shows than the ones we wanted to see them on, twenty years after we wanted to watch them. And proving that an unwelcome return doesn&amp;#039;t need to follow a lengthy absence, let&amp;#039;s recall the failed comebacks of Matthew Perry, Sean Hayes, and the other stars mentioned in Vulture&amp;#039;s slightly more optimistic take on Cosby&amp;#039;s development deal. To be clear, NBC is responsible for many of the aforementioned mistakes \u2014 we don&amp;#039;t blame aging stars for taking high-paying, cushy jobs \u2014 and their acquisition of the Cosby project indicates that they they&amp;#039;re doubling (quintupling?) down on the Betty White strategy while ignoring the fact that the public literally demanded more Betty White. As far as I know, no one has made a Facebook page clamoring for Bill Cosby to host SNL. But what is the network supposed to do when hanging a show on untested talent is as prudent an investment as opening a steakhouse across the street from Peter Luger? Historically, the best bet is to incubate talent internally before hinging a show on it, a strategy that has finally permeated the walls of the executive boardroom at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. After developing The Mindy Project, the Golden Globe-winning Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the upcoming (and great-looking) Mulaney in-house and then inexplicably passing them on to Fox, NBC signed a three-year production deal with Park and Recreation star Amy Poehler, gave a series order to a Tina Fey-helmed project starring The Office&amp;#039;s Ellie Kemper, just gave Rob Lowe a pilot, and handed Late Night to soon-to-be-former SNL head writer Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show to another hilarious SNL alum, Jimmy Fallon. Looks like the only thing left for NBC to do in their climb to the summit of Demo Mountain is let the guy who talked them into those decisions call the shots when this Cosby show likely doesn&amp;#039;t work out. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a26903/cosby-show-nbc-old-stars-0114/>