“The Cosby Show,” starring Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and Phylicia Rashad as his wife, Clair, a successful attorney, blazed a historic trail in primetime television with the depiction of an educated, upper-middle-class African American family.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who died while vacationing with his family in Costa Rica, made dyslexia a household name as he played his character Theo on "The Cosby Show."

Over the course of the show’s eight year run, this moment was not always taken as a given; the son, Theo Huxtable, was for years presented as a chronic underachiever, more interested in the typical trappings of teenage boyhood—friends,