Cosby remained quiet until November, when he was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech in Orlando, before every past, present, and future network V.I.P. (including NBC’s), Cosby railed against the fact that here it is 1992 and the programmers at the TV networks are still spewing sitcoms about blacks as caricatures—written by “driveby” white writers (who he says drive by black people on the streets and think they know about them). “Really and truly, The Cosby Show should have shown producers and writers something about our own people. I’m not talking about, as an African-American, our own people. But African-Americans as American people,” he lashed out. “But clearly none of these images happen to the kind of people that you can imagine graduating from college, or you can imagine working beside you in the steel mill and thinking seriously about their family, about their life, about their contribution to making a better United States of America and world. . . .

“Now, I am not a person who believes that a white writer cannot write about African-Americans. They can. The point is, do they want to?” Cosby said indignantly. “I’m talking to people who are supposed to be my peers, and I’m saying to you all, and I’m begging you all now, stop this horrible massacre of images that are being put on this screen now. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to your children watching. Because that isn’t us. It isn’t us. It isn’t us. It isn’t us.”

The audience responded with thunderous applause. Tartikoff, who was there, called it “brilliant.” Phylicia Rashad, who introduced Cosby, was ecstatic. “If the industry was going to listen to anybody, it would be him.” The speech is now known among Cosby and his inner circle as “the Moses Pronouncement.”

A month after Moses went to the mountain, he found himself in the paper. On New Year’s Eve 1992, Cosby was the subject of a Wall Street Journal editorial. It praised his courage, saying, “We’d like to believe that someone, somewhere in that industry felt the force of the home truths delivered at that Hall of Fame induction ceremony—in particular, the final ones, which we think should be posted on the walls of Hollywood’s watering holes and network meeting rooms.”

But someone was listening. In January 1993, Wussler (who had been looking seriously at NBC for more than a year) decided that Cosby, with his credibility and recognizability, was a perfect linchpin for the management group he was assembling for his own run at NBC. “Why wouldn’t he want a creative genius to help in the TV-entertainment sphere?” said a source close to the deal. Once joined, Cosby, Wussler, and company decided to go with Goldman Sachs, whom Cosby’s lawyers had previously chosen from all the interested investment banks.

Wussler’s invitation solved Cosby’s main problem. The comic had not been afraid to bid for NBC on his own, but when he realized, according to one source, that “not even $4 billion was going to be enough,” he started to reconsider. He was rich, but not that rich.

The idea of Cosby as network kingpin is greeted with enthusiasm by those who appreciate his creative genius and moral commitment. But it doesn’t sit well with some entertainment veterans who have worked with Cosby in a business capacity. The picture that emerges from these sources is of an ego out of control, someone who is not used to hearing “No.” But does that make Cosby temperamentally unsuited to helm NBC? Or are these the necessary qualifications?

Matt Williams, who helped create Roseanne and Home Improvement and who got his start as a writer on Cosby, sums it up: “Bill is a jazz musician, literally and metaphorically. In life, he doesn’t follow the notes on the page. He riffs and it’s unstructured. And when he’s standing onstage as a single performer, it is one of the most brilliant things you will ever see. But a jazz musician running a network? It can’t be. A network is very big and structured. I would give Bill a shot at artistic director, but don’t ever let him get managing director.”

That’s what Wussler and friends have in mind.