Broken All the Way Down: The Passing of Malcolm-Jamal Warner

Or How to Mourn Adolescence

I had to pause to pay homage to Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who I just found out died in an apparent drowning accident.

He was 54, a mere two years older than me.

Even as I am typing, I am having trouble processing this.

Did I know him like that? No. The one opportunity I had to take a photo with him left me so star-struck that I couldn’t even go up to get his autograph or take the photo. While I wish I could have, even if I’d gone back in time to urge myself to do it, both real-time me and future me would be stuck to the spot.

I, like most gen-Xers, grew up with Theo Huxtable in our living room from the legendary sitcom The Cosby Show, which ran for 8 seasons from 1984 to 1992. The show took me through my adolescence into my freshan year of college. Malcolm-Jamal is forever immortalized as Theo, and we watched him grow up from being friends with “Cockroach” played by Carl Anthony Payne, to being diagnosed with dyslexia and having the learning disability treated in a dignified way that not only did not ostracize him but gave him and others power, to becoming a man who eventually mentored and taught kids, all before a live studio audience. I distinctly remember him with a moderate high-top fade athat was colored cinnamon at the edges, a sign of his maturity.

He often said that he had still been referred as Theo when he walked by, in much the same way Ron Howard, who recently got his first Emmy nod for acting, is still referred to as Opie Cunningham (thanks Eddie Murphy for melding Howard’s character names in a joke in your SNL days, which can only be seen via The Best of Saturday Night Live with Eddie Murphy, but here’s the transcript of the skit).

He was our childhood hero, both on and off the screen, because unlike some other child stars, he stayed grounded, drug-free, and away from scandals. He even took a break away from acting to pursue other creative avenues. When he re-entered the acting landscape, it was as a man.

And oh boy, was he a man, full-fledged with a beard and smooth chocolate skin, a far cry from the skinny boy who wanted the Gordon Gatrell shirt and trusted his sister to sew a knockoff (that shirt is in the NMAAHC).

Malcolm & Eddie would be his first grownup sitcom. Then MJW would venture into dramatic roles, in which he excelled, namely The Resident, where he played a physician. He won a Grammy as a spoken-word artist, and his most recent project was the podcast NAH, an acronym for Not All Hood, where he, two other hosts, and many times a guest host would chop it up and discuss Black culture as a diaspora, not a monolith. Season 2’s 3rd episode had just been released TWO DAYS ago.

Again, I had to take a pause from everything to jsut pause and reflect.

RIH Theo.