The ‘Slacker’ Teen Who Was More Than Just a Punch Line
In the first episode of The Cosby Show, Cliff Huxtable (played by Bill Cosby) walks into his only son’s messy room with a mission: getting him to care about improving his straight-D report card. But the teenager proves difficult to rattle.
After his father makes a big show of giving him Monopoly money and then taking it all away bill by bill for hypothetical expenses, Theo (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) holds firm in his assertion that he doesn’t need to emulate his parents in order to be happy.