Everybody Hates Chris is apparently getting revival – as an animated series that’s reportedly in development over at CBS Studios. Everybody Hates Chris was the acclaimed series based on comedian Chris Rock‘s life growing up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in the 1980s. It played on the title of Everybody Loves Raymond by showcasing the hard-luck daily life and coming-of-age situations young Chris (Tyler James Williams) went through while framing those tales as the foundation for the comedian’s future material. The show featured the talents of Terry Crews (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) as Chris’s dad and Tichina Arnold (Martin) playing his mother. No word on whether or not the original cast would voice the animated series.
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It would be interesting to see how a revival of Everybody Hates Chris plays in the changing landscape of 2020s America. The show was an interesting look at the comedian and intersection of racial lines he crossed by going from his Brooklyn neighborhood to a mostly-white school. Chris Rock himself has expressed that a lot of the deeper subtext of those childhood experiences Everybody Hates Chris is based on, no longer feel as “funny” as they used to:
“I thought I was actually dealing with it, and the reality is I never dealt with it,” Rock told THR last year. “The reality was the pain and the fear that that brought me, I was experiencing it every day.”
The comedian also acknowledged that the kind of sitcom hijinks we saw from Everybody Hates Chris‘ parental characters was also far less humorous than his parents’ actual experience: “No matter what I was going through, it paled in comparison to what my mom or my dad went through; so, there wasn’t a lot of dealing with it.”
Chris Rock is now in a very different place in his life than when Everybody Hates Chris aired; the comedian is divorced, in therapy, and has been open (both on and off stage) about various dark dips in his mind and behaviors. In an animated format Everybody Hates Chris would have much more freedom to play on a heightened and surreal level with the ideas of race, struggle, and the effects on the characters. It may look more childish, but the comedy could arguably cut much deeper.
