Everybody Hates Chris

Everybody Hates Chris is an awsome show; I really like it!

It is smart and funny which is rare in this day of tv. Glad to see it will be on the CW next season.I love the quick humor. If you dont pay attention, you can miss a joke. I like the real-ness of it... you can say "yup, my parents...."
Also it's in tune with Chris Rock's standup comedy routines.

The stuff in this show is good because it's based on reality, not some really lame situations that some stupid writers made up.
George Lopez also has great standup comedy routines, but his TV show sucks because it has nothing whatsoever to do with his comedy routines. It's just a really lame, generic family sitcom. I would have loved to have seen a George Lopez sitcom about poor mexican-americans and all the crap they have to go through.



Below is a review of the show in case you ahve yet to watch it.

BEVERLY HILLS - The fall TV show with the biggest buzz has turned out to be "Everybody Hates Chris," a UPN sitcom narrated and produced by, and loosely based on the teen years of, Chris Rock.

Yesterday, Rock tried to soothe fears that his involvement would be minimized once the series began.

"I don't think I've ever done anything and walked out," Rock told members of the Television Critics Association yesterday. "I don't think there's any evidence of that. ... My name is Rock, not Chappelle."

The show stars 12-year-old Tyler James Williams as young Chris, who, like Rock, lived in a tough part of Brooklyn - the eldest of three kids in a loving but strict two-parent household - and was bused to a predominantly white junior high school more than an hour away.

The Italians and the Irish, Rock recalled, were his primary adversaries in that new environment. He said, "They would beat me and the Jews up."
Asked if his humor developed as a way to protect himself from bullies, Rock said that was a fallacy.

Bullies, he said, would say, "That's funny. I'm gonna punch you in the face now."
And while the premiere episode shows Rock standing up to a bully before getting beaten up, Rock said the reality wasn't even that dramatic.
"I got kicked until the bell rang at 3 o'clock and I went home," Rock said, "but that's not a funny episode."

Rock cited "The Jeffersons" as his "favorite TV show of all time," and John Amos' patriarchal role on "Good Times" as the sort of tough and strong but loving father he has Terry Crews playing as his own dad on "Everybody Hates Chris."

"I wanted to give him that James Evans nobility," Rock said.
Most sitcom dads, Rock added, he dismissed as "theater" - a term he explained as "not gay, not straight, just theater."

Rock admitted he'd rather not spend time with the "hoopla" of promoting a new TV show, but had no problem shooting out funny one-liners in response to questions.

# Asked how he felt about producing a family sitcom when his own standup act featured lots of profanity, Rock replied, "People that curse have families, too. ... I'm married. I got kids. I grew up in a family."

# Asked how he found young Williams to play his teen TV counterpart, Rock said, "I was at Michael Jackson's house, right? And in the driveway, this kid runs out ..."

# Asked if there were any alternate titles before "Everybody Hates Chris" was chosen, Rock said UPN wouldn't approve "Let's Shoot Chris in the Head" - then offered other similarly made-up alternative titles that got big laughs from reporters, including "Mad About Chris Rock" and "Rockfeld." * * * NY POST/LINDA STASI "Everybody Hates Chris" Tonight at 8 on UPN * *
WHILE I love Chris, I don't really love "Ev erybody Hates Chris."

And despite the fact that Chris Rock may, in fact, be the funniest man on the planet, his much-hyped sitcom, which debuts tonight, just doesn't deliver his usual over-the-top rock 'n' roll.
But then again, maybe I'm just offended by his jumping on the relentlessly ignorant stereotyping of Italian-Americans as bigots, morons and uneducated slobs - which this show milks dry.
The show is based on Rock's teen years growing up in Bed Stuy but traveling two hours by public transportation each day - at the insistence of his parents - to school in an Italian-American neighborhood.

First day of school, little Chris (played by the phenomenal Tyler James Williams) gets into a fight with a fat, gross kid, Caruso, who right off calls him "n- - - - -" and "Satchmo," and "cornbread."

Let me just point out that had I ever used those words in my Italian-American home I would have landed (courtesy of the back of my mother's hand) in the next county.
I can't imagine my own daughter ever heard those words when she was little - except on TV.
The cast's mom (Tichina Arnold), dad (Terry Crews) and sibs - Drew (Tequan Richmond) and Tonya (Imani Hakim) - are all very, very good. But what's missing here are the big laughs, despite Rock's clever narration.

For example, when Chris gets into a dust-up with Caruso, he's doesn't duck out of the after-school fistfight because everybody knows that schoolyard fights are always broken up in a minute. Meantime, 30 minutes later they're still fighting. Instead of both kids looking the worse for wear, they just get their shoes dirty. Who knew that Brooklyn in the '80s was worse than Alabama in the '50s?

It's not that you can't make fun of bigotry, it's just that if you're going to do it, and you're going to do it on a sitcom, it better be hilarious - or it just becomes the very prejudice you're trying to parody.

The premise is so promising, however, that there's a good shot that the show will get funnier - Rock is too smart to not fix the flaws. * * * NY DAILY NEWS/DAVID BIANCULLI To say that "Everybody Hates Chris," which premieres tonight at 8, is the best series UPN has ever presented isn't giving it enough praise.

It's one of the best new shows from any network this year, and is a total, almost giddy delight from start to finish.

The title, a playful flip of the just departed "Everybody Loves Raymond," is instantly understandable and likable.
So is the premise, which has Chris Rock narrating stories from his own adolescence - his own version of "Wonder Years," beginning in 1982, when he was the only black kid bussed to an otherwise all-white school.

Rock's comic voice - both his perspective and the way he barks certain syllables for emphasis - give "Everybody Hates Chris" lots of energy from the very first frame.
But he's far from alone.

He and co-creator Ali LeRoi, whose own contributions to this sitcom shouldn't be overlooked, tell the story of Chris Rock, age 13, in a way that makes it both hilariously specific and wonderfully universal.

On camera, young Chris is played by Tyler James Williams, the most ideally cast young actor in a sitcom since Fred Savage starred in "The Wonder Years."
Like Savage, Williams looks and acts wise beyond his years, but still looks realistically like a kid. You can believe him, as Chris, when he tries to stand up to a white school bully by trying to "out-black" him.

You also can believe him when he smothers a flushing toilet with pillows out of fear of awakening his sleeping father.

The parents in "Chris" deserve special mention, and are given their own clearly delineated characters.

Rochelle (Tichina Arnold), the mother, is firm but loving, looking out for her husband and children without in any way deferring to them. Julius (Terry Crews), the father, works multiple jobs to provide for his family. He obsesses over any perceived wastefulness, including spilt milk, while adoring his young daughter Tonya (Imani Hakim), and providing a strong role model for Chris and his younger brother, Drew (Tequan Richmond).
It's significant, and welcome, that Julius is a black patriarch on TV representing that father really does know best.
On broadcast network television, that's a list that previously pretty much starts, and ends, with John Amos on "Good Times" and Bill Cosby on "The Cosby Show."
It's much more significant, though, that "Chris" is laugh-out-loud, think-about-it-afterward funny.

When Chris gets into the inevitable after-school fight with that white bully, the interminable length of it is played for laughs, as is the use of "Ebony and Ivory," a song from the time setting of the show, on the soundtrack. It gets laughs - but hidden within that scene, and others, are quick commentaries on race, and police, that would be right at home in Rock's incendiary standup act.

"Everybody Hates Chris" is a perfect TV pilot, establishing the premise and characters almost effortlessly. There's been some concern about how involved Rock will be in the series as it progresses, but I'm not worried.
It's in good hands with LeRoi - and Rock quickly will come to accept and embrace the obvious, which is that this sitcom is one of the best things he's ever done.