Mr. Warner, who played the only son of Bill Cosby’s character on the beloved 1980s sitcom, drowned in Costa Rica.

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.

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,