Bill Cosby is talking whipped cream.
" . . . A vat of whipped cream," he proposes, "with a paintbrush in it where you just slap it on him." By "him" Cosby means Hilton Lucas, the character he plays on his CBS sitcom.He is standing in cavernous Stage E at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, consulting with executive producer Norman Steinberg.
It's the end of a long rehearsal, the day before taping the season's 25th and final episode (and the day before the Los Angeles police announce the capture of the man they say killed Cosby's son in January, a tragedy that has hung over the show and haunted its star the two months since).
But at the moment, Cosby is consumed with just one thing: fixing the script's slapstick finale. How to stage it remains uncertain.
"Uncertain" could describe "Cosby" overall. Extremely high-profile (as if any TV show Cosby did could be otherwise), his new sitcom knocked nobody's socks off in its freshman season.
Even some of those present on Stage E this March afternoon concede the vexing truth: A series built around television's most identifiable star continues to suffer an identity crisis.
" . . . The tag is, he has been kind enough," riffs Cosby, still sketching out the episode's finale in his free-form, almost be-bop style, "the tag for this is, y'know, he's been kind enough to let the kid - you know what I mean? And I'm sitting there and I have to take it, y'understand? OK?"
"OK," says Steinberg, who really does understand. Then he's off to get another rewrite going.
Historic Kaufman Astoria is home to "Imus in the Morning," "Sesame Street" and lots of movies. And it was right here, too, that, from 1984 through 1992, Cosby soared in "The Cosby Show," a spectacularly successful NBC sitcom about an attractive professional couple (she a lawyer, he an obstetrician) who seemed to have it all, including the last word in every exchange with their townhouse-full of kids.
After that came a pair of misfires: "You Bet Your Life," a syndicated game show, and a bland whodunit on NBC called "The Cosby Mysteries."
Then, 18 months ago, CBS' newly named entertainment president, Leslie Moonves, unveiled Cosby as the key player to pull his anemic network from the brink.
Cosby's new sitcom would be based on "One Foot in the Grave," a popular British comedy about a downsized worker and his wife in their autumn years, acrimoniously coping with his joblessness.
At the CBS announcement on Dec. 1, 1995, Cosby told the press he would be portraying a "curmudgeon, a correctable fool" who is "Archie Bunker without the racism and sexism."
He brought back his "Cosby Show" co-star Phylicia Rashad to once again play his wife, and added Madeline Kahn as his wife's best friend, Doug E. Doug as the lovable but ne'er-do-well next-door neighbor, and T'Keyah Crystal Keymah as the Lucas' grown daughter.
Their world would be a modest Queens neighborhood not unlike the one surrounding Kaufman Astoria.
On Sept. 16, 1996, "Cosby" - the seventh TV series to bear some version of Bill Cosby's name - took the lead-off spot on CBS' Monday schedule. The premiere outing won a hefty 27 percent share of the viewers.
Five weeks later, its share had plunged to 17 percent.
"Losing 10 share points with the fear of going even lower," sighs Cosby in the plush refuge of his office/dressing room. "I think it was solely because I wasn't doing the things the 27-share people had tuned in to see."
A safe bet. For more than three decades, he had reaped incalculable goodwill from audiences who, in turn, relied on him to stick to variations on a single irresistible theme: a hip, empathetic patriarch.
By now, at age 58, Cosby has long since come to be seen as the latter-day Father of Our Country, a family man of towering credibility, influence and means.
Even when struck powerless by the murder of his only son, 27-year-old Ennis Cosby - well, rather than retreat into private mourning, the father was brave for his extended family. He saw that his fans, grieving for him, needed him to make them laugh again. Adopting his son's chipper greeting ("Hello, friend"), he got back to work.
So why wouldn't viewers be perplexed by Cosby recasting himself as Hilton Lucas, a grouchy, none-too-levelheaded baggage handler laid off by the airline he had worked for all his life? For the first time in his career, Cosby was playing someone operating not from a position of strength but from weakness. And it just didn't compute.
"Cosby," in short, got in the way of Cosby being Cosby.
"There were times Hilton did things a Bill Cosby would not get away with," acknowledges Cosby, speaking slowly, deliberately, a sort of godfather of comedy as he declares, "The character had to be changed."
All through the season (which ended with this past Monday's episode), "Cosby" was going through changes, too. Writers for the show charted its migration further and further from the bitterly funny British original - and did so, at times, with serious misgivings.
And what remained after all this tinkering? Well, for one thing, a hit.
David Poltrack, CBS' research guru, notes that the most recent Nielsen survey ranks the series 21st for the season (out of more than 100 shows), and that, all season, "Cosby" has dominated its daunting Monday-at-7-p.m. half-hour - a slot with no network lead-in and competition on five other networks.
Poltrack brands the show "an unqualified success."
"I feel great about it, I really do," echoes the network's entertainment chief, Leslie Moonves. "I would do `Cosby' again in a second."
Of course, whatever success "Cosby" has achieved dims with comparisons, as inevitable as they are unfair, to "The Cosby Show."
That was the sitcom that not only saved NBC's bacon but the sitcom genre, to boot. It filled the air with an excited buzz even before its premiere, boasted a perfect vision with perfect execution from its first week, finished its freshman season in the No. 3 slot, and then owned the top spot for the next four seasons.
"It was probably more thought-out," allows Rashad, who was wife Clair to Cosby's Cliff Huxtable. "It didn't feel as touch-and-go as some of the weeks have with the current show.
"I don't think we've hit our stride yet," she says. "But we will. We will."
In his sparely appointed office just off the soundstage, Steinberg, who became the show's third "runner" during a year he describes as "quite a roller-coaster ride," peers through his tortoise-shell frames and says, "I think it took a season to get Cliff and Clair Huxtable out of viewers' minds.
"I think there was a haze, and in that haze I think there was some groping going on internally: `Where are we headed?' I can't tell you that we're there yet. But I think we're getting there."
The larger problem may not be where the show is headed, but the baggage it's carrying en route - the baggage of the original concept.
For instance, in softening the Hilton Lucas character, Cosby has had to soft-pedal the jobless state Hilton finds himself in.
In the premiere episode, the pain of being unemployed was at least given lip service. Hilton spoke of being a man "cut down in his prime" (to which his wife Ruth implausibly replied, "It's been three weeks! Get over it!").
But as the season wore on, there seemed less and less mention of that plight - as if it had simply gone away, as if Hilton, bowing to his wife, really did get over it.
Apparently, Cosby wants to get over it, too. "He doesn't even want to HEAR the word `downsized' anymore," says Dennis Klein, the creator of the show and its runner until his departure in February.
Taping for the 1997-98 season begins in August. Then the task resumes to retrofit "Cosby," a show that can claim a great star and a healthy following, with the one thing it still hasn't settled on: a clear vision.
As he looks ahead, Cosby is asked if he found this uncertain year a good experience.
"Yes," he says, his voice dipping into a cool, assured whisper, "and I want more." A man used to having his way, he says it again. "Yes. And I want more."