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Here’s What Tempestt Bledsoe Has Been Up To Since The Cosby Show

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Vanessa Huxtable grew up on national television, and Tempestt Bledsoe never really left show business.

For eight seasons, Bledsoe played the middle Huxtable daughter on NBC’s “The Cosby Show,” a sitcom that turned its entire young cast into household names between 1984 and 1992. Once the show wrapped, she didn’t disappear into private life the way some former child stars do — she went to college, tried hosting, tried reality TV, and kept landing scripted roles for the next three decades. Here’s the actual rundown of where her career went after Vanessa Huxtable.

• Bledsoe earned a finance degree from New York University after “The Cosby Show” ended, then pivoted into hosting her own syndicated talk show, “The Tempestt Bledsoe Show,” produced by Dick Clark and Columbia TriStar Television for one season in 1995-96.
• She starred as Marny opposite Anthony Anderson in NBC’s “Guys with Kids” from 2012 to 2013 and voiced Sheriff Hooper in Laika’s Oscar-nominated 2012 film “ParaNorman.”
• In December 2010, she took over as host of the Style Network’s “Clean House,” stepping into the role after Niecy Nash left the show.

From Talk Show Host To Reality TV

Bledsoe’s first big post-“Cosby” swing was hosting her own daytime show in 1995, backed by Dick Clark’s production company and Columbia TriStar Television. It didn’t survive past a single season, going off the air in 1996, but it set the pattern for the rest of her career — she wasn’t going to just chase scripted parts.

She spent the 2000s and early 2010s bouncing between reality formats. She competed on VH1’s “Celebrity Fit Club,” and in 2009 she appeared on the Fox Reality Channel series “Househusbands of Hollywood” alongside her longtime partner, actor Darryl M. Bell, best known for “A Different World.” Bledsoe and Bell have been together since 1993. Then in December 2010, she stepped into the host’s chair on “Clean House,” the Style Network’s home-renovation staple, taking over from Niecy Nash — a changeover not unlike the kind of cast shakeups documented in how That ’70s Show’s cast has really transformed over the years.

Steady Work In Scripted TV

Away from the reality shows, Bledsoe kept picking up guest roles that kept her name in circulation — “The Practice,” “The Parkers,” and “South of Nowhere” all had her in for episodes here and there. The bigger get came in 2012, when she landed a series-regular role as Marny in NBC’s “Guys with Kids,” starring alongside Anthony Anderson. The show ran for one season before NBC pulled the plug in 2013, but it marked her most substantial return to network prime time since “Cosby” went off the air.

She voiced Sheriff Hooper in “ParaNorman” the same year she was starring as Marny on NBC — animation and network sitcom work, running side by side.

That overlap says something about how Bledsoe worked through this stretch of her career: she wasn’t locked into one lane. While “Guys with Kids” was airing, she was also lending her voice to Laika’s stop-motion feature “ParaNorman,” which picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature in 2012.

Returning To Vanessa Huxtable

Bledsoe never fully closed the door on the role that made her famous. In 2014, she reprised Vanessa Huxtable for an episode of Nickelodeon’s “Instant Mom,” giving longtime “Cosby Show” fans a direct callback rather than just a career footnote. It’s the kind of moment that tends to resurface whenever fans revisit sitcom rosters from that era, the same way people track down where the cast of All in the Family ended up decades later.

She kept working steadily into the streaming era, too. In July 2019, Bledsoe made a guest appearance on Netflix’s “Family Reunion,” proof that more than 25 years after Vanessa Huxtable left the Huxtable brownstone, casting directors were still calling.

Between the talk show, the reality stints, the NBC sitcom run, an Oscar-nominated animated film, and a Netflix guest spot in 2019, Bledsoe’s résumé since “The Cosby Show” reads less like a comeback story and more like someone who simply never stopped taking the next job.