After three years, countless hours of therapy and a few carefully administered shock therapy treatments, I no longer quote House of Cosbys on a daily basis. It’s been a long hard path to recovery, but here I go, screwing it all up again by looking back at this classic of the online video comedy world.
With what he thought was the complete creative freedom of the online video world, animator Justin Roiland came up with what is still today one of the most bizarre premises for a web series: A man builds a cloning machine so that he can surround himself with facsimiles of Bill Cosby. Unfortunately, the cloning process is highly unstable, and chaos ensues. One man, a compound full of Cosbys, and one Cosbette. It got written about in newspapers.
Some might argue that the series descends from hilarious chaos to incomprehensible chaos in the last two episodes, but whether or not the series could have returned to its early glory is a great unanswerable question of the Internet. House of Cosbys was one of the first great breakout online video series — and also one of the first to experience Death by Lawsuit, courtesy of William H. Cosby’s lawyers, whom the staff of Channel 101 did not want to fight in a fair use lawsuit. Roiland did get his revenge in the Acceptable TV short “Kosbees,” though:
Since the series ended, Roiland has remained a mainstay of the Channel 101 empire, also accumulating an impressive set of acting and producing credits, including, most recently, teaming up with Jack Black (another Channel 101 alumni) for the Fox animated pilot Relative Insanity. Without early success stories like House of Cosbys, it’s possible that fewer talented creators would have turned to the web as a means for self-expression and exposure. And it’s impossible to say how much less full of mirth we would all be.
