The Cosby Standard?

This is some academic free writing I'm working on... I hope I can mine it into a book chapter... Feedback welcome.

The Cosby Standard
I will always be grateful for Thursday night television from the 1984-85 season on NBC. That's when the late Brandon Tartikoff took a major gamble (when CBS and ABC declined) and launched "The Cosby Show." At the age of 14, I knew that I was destined to have a career in media somehow because I had already began to research the business of television. Thinking back on the other "Black" television programs during that time, my choices were rather limited: the few African Americans I was able to see were analogous to raisins in oatmeal. There was Nell Carter on Give Me A Break, The Jeffersons on CBS, and Benson on ABC. What was missing from the narrative of these programs was that of the stable functional Black family: enter a family named Huxtable.
Mom and dad as we know were middle age protypic "buppies" or as others would say black "Bourgeoisie." The show ran for nine years, spawning a spinoff series "A Different World," and most important shattered the monolithic politics of class and race on network television, particularly during the conservative Reagan era. Flash forward 30 years: The Cosby Show is in rerun rotation, I'm a researcher in mass communication and media studies, and my eyes have grown somewhat jaded, almost cynical.
When I was younger, the Cosby Show gave me hope. I wanted my family to be the next generation "Huxtables." However, my reality is drastically different. I'm a single full-time dad. On the program, both parents were affluent practitioners in there professions, a doctor and a lawyer. In my reality, I am a doctor, a Ph.D. who goes to sleep with a monster called debt (I can't discriminate, student loan and consumer debt is debt) and face the dragon of underemployement/unemployment. Last, I was married in the legal sense, still am, but I'm legally separated.
So the question I have then concerns itself with what I will call "The Cosby Standard." A television show which set idealistic family standards; does it invalidate, possibly problematize, the experiences of a larger African American audience? In this analysis, I would like to examine this post modern "Black Bourgeoisie" Cosby Standard within the context a 21st century political economy. Using the lens of critical media studies I would like to submit a comparison/contrast of the family structure in relationship the lived experience of those who watched the program nearly 30 years ago.