The actor, who died last week, carried the burden of representing the meritocratic Black boy par excellence, and made it look easy.

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,

Some of the greatest lessons about growing up and what it means to be an adult I learned from—or, rather, through—Theo Huxtable. The middle-child sibling on The Cosby Show, Theo was a conduit for the modern teenager in the ’80s and ’90s: a sense of entitlement and arrogance permeating the usual haplessness that accompany coming of age.