Guilty pleasure

Tyler James Williams

Food? Music? No. A television show that takes place in the halls of Corleone Junior High School in Brooklyn. New York, in 1982.

I stumbled onto "Everybody Hates Chris" sometime last year and, in the months since then, I've become a fan of a comedy series that was canceled after a four-year run. Chris is a 13-year-old boy, trying his best to navigate the stormy seas of adolescence at an age when everything and everyone seems to conspire against him -- in humorous ways, of course. (See the short video at the end of this post.)

Remember the show "Malcolm in the Middle"? This has the same feel, with the title character narrating the action. Except that it's the wicked funny Chris Rock whose raspy voice you hear and the episodes are inspired by Rock's own boyhood experiences in Brooklyn. Which means nothing is off-limits and racial stereotypes come at you fast and furious. Drug dealers? Petty thieves? A womanizing funeral director? Moms selling food stamps? They're all characters in Chris' working-class neighborhood. But, then, the show also delivers a lot of good takeaways: the overarching love of family, the bonds of loyalty shared by best friends, the tender wisdom passed from father to son, and -- make no mistake -- lots of laughs.


Terry Crews plays the earnest, hard-working father, who wears his name (Julius) on his workingman's uniform, Tachina Arnold is Rochelle, the high-octane wife full of sass and great one-liners, who keeps Chris and his two siblings in line. A few examples:

"Don't come home stupid."
"Boy, I brought you into this world and I can take you out."
"Don't make me knock the chap off your lips."

Tyler James Williams plays Chris, a nerdy, unathletic kid who spends much of his time trying to avoid the school bully and trying to unlock the mystery of the opposite sex, but succeeds at neither. And nothing is funnier than seeing this mild-mannered kid with a sweater vest but hearing Chris Rock as narrator:

"My mother would give away all the food we had, if she thought it would prove we didn't need it."
"If you had a Walkman, you could even listen to bad music, and no one would know... unless you were dumb enough to sing along. "
"I thought I'd see George Bush wearing a do-rag before Tonya [his sister] got in trouble."

The show still airs on Nickeleon, so if you've got cable, check it out.



Photo: www.1iverating.com