le pressing issues and challenge the majority. Instead it uses stock characters and scenes to tell the same story over and over again without stirring up any controversy. This leaves little room for showing reality. In conducting 100 in-depth interviews with middle-class black Americans from 16 cities across the US, the authors received responses concerning the show that were vastly different. The responses varied from harshly negative to extremely positive depending on how the black person identified with the show, if in fact s/he did at all. The people who felt the show portrayed African Americans negatively had no similar experiences to the Huxtable's and therefore felt it was unrealistic. These respondents felt the show was too "white" and did not present the real-life living situations of everyday middle-class blacks but instead an extreme case that represented none of the black people they knew. The Cosby Show also made respondents feel that real problems suffered by blacks on an everyday basis, such as racism, classism and lack of opportunity, were deemed irrelevant because they were not even mentioned on the show. According to Innis and Feagin, " the show's popularity has set back race relations because its view of black assimilation fails to take into account the context of the world outside of the four walls of the Huxtable household, " (692). However, respondents who did like the show and felt it portrayed blacks positively shared similar experiences with the Huxtable family or how they dealt with certain issues. They felt the show portrayed blacks in a decidedly positive light, as human beings that are civilized, not savages who are gang-bangers and live in ghettos . There are many larger sociopolitical implications of the media representation of black family life in The Cosby Show; however, the dominant and most frightening of these implications is the idea that the "American Dream is real for anyone who is willing ...
