Nobody Hates 'Chris' ... Yet

At the Oscars earlier this year, Chris Rock proved to the world that he actually could crack a joke without using the f-word. Now the button-pushing, obscenity-spewing comedian has set his sights on creating his own TV comedy. The result is Everybody Hates Chris, a genuinely funny show with a surprisingly warmhearted core.

Prior to the launch of the fall television season, Rock’s quasi-biographical Wonder Years-meets-the-'hood series gathered up baskets full of buzz. It was praised as having The Cosby Show’s positivity (the Family Friendly Programming Forum gave it a thumbs-up). And the Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin spoke for more than a few critics when he called it “the best new sitcom in a decade.”

That may be a bit of a stretch, but one thing is clear: So far, it’s hard to find anyone who actually hates Chris.

We’re Movin’ on Up
Set in 1982, Chris begins with Rock's father, Julius, trying to improve his family’s surroundings by moving them from the projects to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y. Unfortunately, as Rock (who narrates) points out, “Bed-Stuy” would soon become the epicenter for the crack epidemic of the ’80s. It sets a perfect tone for this mildly tragic comedy in which 13-year-old Chris (played by the wide-eyed Tyler James Williams) routinely gets bullied, beaten up and blamed for everything that goes wrong. “My comedy tends to be about sad things that I make funny,” Rock has said. “I take a serious topic and then [ask], ‘OK, where’s the joke?’”

Chris certainly contains no shortage of humorous material, with scenes often serving as mere vignettes to set up Rock’s hilarious everyman-takes-on-everyday-life shtick. Julius, for example, steals quite a few scenes in the premiere by deadpanning the exact value of anything wasted. “That’s 49 cent of spilt milk drippin’ on my table,” he says. “Somebody gonna drink this milk!” Equally droll is Rock's recollection of why his parents sent him to a school across town. Its all-white student body didn’t get “a Harvard education," he intones, "just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store education.”

Race for the Ratings
Rock may be toning down his language, but he's not about to let go of his hyperbolic—all-but-trademarked—race-relations material. At Chris’ new school, red-headed Italian bully Joey Caruso calls him an assortment of racist names. The principal responds by blaming the lone black kid in the school after Joey pushes Chris into him. A white policeman walks on by when Chris gets beaten up after school. And white adults (even a pregnant woman) on a public bus opt to stand rather than sit next to him.

But somehow in this racially heated environment, Rock has a way of drawing laughter here with jabs that tweak both sides. When gunshots ring out near a Brooklyn middle school, he quips, “Much like rock ‘n’ roll, school shootings were also invented by blacks and stolen by the white man.” And after Joey slams him with the n-word, Rock states, “Oh, he got away with calling me n-gger that day, but later in life, he said it at a DMX concert and almost got stomped to death.”

It’s this kind of acerbic yet multi-layered wit that turns Chris into much more than just another disposable UPN comedy (a point validated by the network's record 7.8 million viewers who tuned in to the series premiere). It’s also what makes the show a tad rough around the edges. To convey the grittiness of Rock’s tough upbringings, early episodes have included occasional foul language, bathroom humor and a few sexually loaded one-liners. Whether or not Rock and co-writer Ali LeRoi will escalate such elements remains to be seen, though when Rock was questioned about using the n-word, he responded, “I’ll do whatever the network will let me do. If they let me use the f-word, I’ll use that too.”

Tough Love
I hope that doesn't happen, given the show’s current slant toward old-school parenting and familial bonds. Terry Crews, who plays Julius, heralds the series as “the return of parenting” and points out how most sitcoms portray parents as clueless, out-of-touch figureheads in households actually run by children. “We’re not those kind of people,” he says bluntly of Chris’ onscreen parents. “We’re like the ultra-parent. We’re very strict, very hard-working.”

Indeed, Julius and his wife, Rochelle, sacrifice much for their family, working multiple jobs at all hours of the day. Both are firm with their children. But both obviously love Chris and his two younger siblings—and their feelings are reciprocated. After Julius put Chris to bed with an “I’ll see you in the morning,” Rock poignantly narrates, “My father wasn’t the type to say ‘I love you.’ He was one of four fathers on the block. ‘I’ll see you in the morning’ meant he was coming home. Coming home was his way of saying ‘I love you.’”

In typical sitcom fashion, the poignant moment and its soft background music screeches to a halt when Julius wheels around and yells, “Unplug that clock, boy! You can’t tell time when you asleep—that’s 2 cent an hour!” Sad, funny, sweet, sour, witty, biting, tender, tough ... Everybody Hates Chris is all those things at once.