Everybody Hates Chris (2005-2009)
Everybody Hates Chris is an American television semi-autobiographical sitcom that is inspired by the memories of the teenage years of comedian Chris Rock. The show is set from 1982 to 1987, although Rock himself was actually a teenager from February 7 1978 to February 6, 1985, having been born on February 7, 1965.
The show was created by Chris Rock and Ali LeRoi and was originally developed for Fox before being passed over. It was then picked up by UPN where it aired for its first season in 2005. UPN merged with The WB to become The CW a year later, where it aired its remaining three seasons. In 2009, Rock announced that the series’ end had matched up with his own past and he felt it was time to end the show.
Characters
Tyler James Williams as Chris, a skinny, nerdy, African-American teenager – portraying Chris Rock in his younger years.
Terry Crews as Julius – Chris’ caring, hard-working, penny-pinching father.
Tichina Arnold as Rochelle – Chris’ loving, conscientious, demanding, temperamental, disciplinarian mother.
Tequan Richmond as Drew – Chris’ easy-going, good-looking, popular, athletic, bigger, younger brother.
Imani Hakim as Tonya – Chris’ little sister, spoiled by her father, and often spiteful to Chris.
Vincent Martella as Greg Wuliger – Chris’ small, smart/nerdy white schoolmate.
Synopsis
The show is a family sitcom, patterned on Chris Rock’s recollection of his teenage years growing up in the 1980s with a wholesome, tight-knit, African-American family, while living in drug-and-gang infested Bedford–Stuyvesant, a neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and also attending a cross-town, all-white public high school.
The real-life Chris Rock provides intermittent narration throughout the show, at times interjecting his young self’s thoughts or sometimes simply recounting the situation he’s describing.
Chris’ family is firmly dominated by strong, loving parents: Julius, a hard-working, frugal laborer who works two jobs while remaining carefully loyal to his wife, Rochelle, a conscientious and powerful housewife and mother who is fiercely protective of the family, while also being fiercely demanding of all in it, especially eldest son Chris.
The series starts just after the parents have moved their children “out of the [low-income housing] projects,” and into a more-upscale two-story apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood—known for its roughness as “Bed-Stuy, do-or-die.”
Chris is a skinny, nerdy young teen. His mother decides to send him to a mostly-white school across town (“two bus rides away”) in an ethnic-Italian neighborhood to ensure he gets a better education. The school is slyly named “Corleone Junior High School” (an apparent reference to the fictional Corleone mafia family from the movie The Godfather or its real-life parallel, the Corleonesi).
Chris finds the new school difficult to adjust to because of social ostracism and the ire of a red-haired bully named Caruso. Ms. Morello, a well-meaning white teacher, treats Chris with naive, condescending assumptions derived from crude racial/ghetto stereotypes. The bright spot in school is Chris’s best friend, Greg (played by Vincent Martella)—a smaller but similarly nerdy white kid.
At home, Chris is often left in charge of his siblings—his younger-but-bigger brother, Drew, and an ornery little sister, Tonya. Mother Rochelle usually keeps a firm grip on the family, while their exhausted breadwinner father, Julius, struggles to catch a little sleep between jobs.
Chris interacts with various characters in the neighborhood—diverse personalities based on real people Rock would see as a kid in his community. These personalities include some hoodlums who try to take advantage of him, a demented old homeless man nicknamed Kill Moves, a shrewd, miserly-but-grandfatherly storekeeper named Doc, and Doc’s neurotic, paranoid, combat-veteran nephew Monk. For several episodes, an overbearing neighbor lady is played by Whoopi Goldberg, the grandmother of the pretty girl next door.
The show—laced with comedy and farce—is primarily about adolescence and family life in inner-city poverty, the determined struggles of good, decent parents to provide a better life and values for their family, an