It’s inconvenient that most people are neither perfect nor worthless.

For starters, when it’s a person we like, it requires us to find justifications and rationalizations.

That applies to Aunt Grace. “We all love Aunt Grace,” we say. “She’s so much fun. She always brings the kids presents. I do wish she wouldn’t use some of that language, but you know, that’s just who she is.”

It applies to presidents, like Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, when their behavior or comments concerning women become inappropriate. “That’s what men do sometimes,” their admirers say. “That’s how they talk.”

Sometimes we’re explaining why we still like a friend who ate someone else’s lunch from the office refrigerator. Sometimes we’re debating whether Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves outweighs his declaration in the foundation document of America that “all men are created equal.”

Our attempt to reconcile conflicting characteristics and actions underlies the whole debate about statues, from Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus to Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson.

And then there’s Bill Cosby.

In 2018, Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault. The conviction was overturned last year by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled the prosecution had introduced inadmissible evidence in the form of a statement Cosby had been promised would remain confidential. While it wasn’t exoneration, it had the same immediate practical effect: release from any sanctions for his conduct.

Flash back a half century and this story has a much sunnier tone. Bill Cosby had already gone a long way toward establishing himself as one of the most beloved, successful and influential comedians of the 20th century. A few years later, as Cliff Huxtable on the hit 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show, he would show millions of people every week that a black Dad could be as befuddled, funny, exasperated, wise and loving as we want American Dads of every shade to be. All men are created equal.

Over those same years, according to approximately 60 women, Bill Cosby was also a sexual predator who drugged and raped them.

How do we sort that out? Can’t we shudder and think about something else?

W. Kamau Bell, a comedian who calls Cosby his primary comic inspiration, says no, we can’t. Or at least we shouldn’t. So he has produced and narrates a four-part documentary now running on Showtime, appropriately titled We Need To Talk About Cosby.

Cosby himself isn’t part of the project. He doesn’t think there should be a project. Resurrecting the case, he has said, is a cheap shot by a media he never liked in the first place.

Some of his critics don’t want to revisit the case, either. The only thing to discuss now, they say, is reformation of a legal system wherein statutes of limitations and the stigma often slapped on victims allows sexual assailants to skate.

Bell disagrees. He thinks reducing Cosby to victim or monster, however much truth either descriptions might hold, prevents us from putting Cosby’s case and life into a far more complicated and valuable perspective.

Accordingly, Bell examines our collective response to the case as painstakingly as the case itself.

He films several women describing in graphic detail what Cosby did to them. He also recounts how Cosby joked for decades on stage about the notorious alleged aphrodisiac Spanish Fly, talking about how slipping it into a woman’s drink made her more sexually compliant.

He also revisits the sexual culture of the 1960s, when Cosby came into prominence both as a comedian and as an actor who smashed a television racial barrier as costar of the hit series I Spy.

For all the activism we attach to the 1960s, women were still largely regarded as objects for men’s pleasure, like nine-irons or sports cars. Bell recalls the Playboy Clubs, where “Bunnies” were dressed as come-hither fantasies and sexual liberation for women went exactly as far as it served men.

He further makes it clear that Playboy Clubs were bastions of equality compared to too much of corporate America, where women who refused to be treated as hands-on decorations risked losing their jobs. Hello world, meet Harvey Weinstein.

Bell doesn’t argue that widespread sexual predation excuses or mitigates individual offenses. He’s arguing more that we won’t reverse the deeper problem by assuming that nailing a couple of famous perpetrators will have a scared-straight effect on thousands of others.

Similarly, Bell doesn’t find it incidental that when the initial charges against Cosby surfaced, many black folks dismissed them as a bunch of white women trying to bring down a black man, knowing that has happened before in America. Only when the critical chorus became multiracial did a reluctant consensus on Cosby begin to coalesce.

Many of the people Bell wanted to ask about Cosby declined to talk, he says, and many who do talk decline to render judgment. That includes several black comedians who saw a more troubling side of Cosby before all this, a side where he could be a bully with an air of entitlement.

Those same comedians, like pretty much everyone else, say they love, admire and respect the professional Bill Cosby with whom they grew up. They note how he leveraged some of that respect to become a cautionary tough-love voice for the black community, urging young folks to do things the old-school way, get an education and keep families together.

At the same time, no one defends the Cosby who admitted — in the deposition the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled inadmissible — that he slipped sedatives and Quaaludes into women’s drinks before initiating sex. That’s because there is no defense, which is what makes the whole conversation so uncomfortable.

Several of interviewees split Cosby into two parts: good Bill and bad Bill. One comedian describes him as a great book with a lousy last chapter.

In some ways that’s not a bad shorthand summation. But when something feels that convenient, the previous four hours of We Need To Talk About Cosby have reminded us, it’s probably also too easy.