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,

As we mourn Malcolm-Jamal Warner, we give thanks for who he was as Theo and who he was a man in the real world.

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.