"Everybody Hates Chris"
UPN
Thursdays 8 pm EST

Before Chris Rock was a funny man, he was a wiseass 13-year-old kid. Or so we learn in "Everybody Hates Chris," Rock's new semi-autobiographical sitcom based on his teen coming-of-age in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant circa 1982.

The focus for young Chris, and for the new show, is teenage life and its lack of promised glamour. Played by Tyler James Williams, who manages to channel a bit of adult Rock's comic persona, the newly teenaged Chris is presented in the pilot episode as not only saddled with a new dose of hormones, but with the quasi-adult responsibilities of a working class youth.

Fortunately, humor and humility mix well in the stand-up comic's first sitcom venture. Not only does Chris have to wake and prepare dinner for his overworked father, he must babysit his over-confident younger siblings (played by Tequan Richmond and Imani Hakim), who seem ridiculously (albeit realistically) hellbent on getting him in trouble. Likewise, adding to Chris's already considerable list of unglamourous responsibilities, his well-meaning parents have decided he should commute two hours and on two buses to the white part of town — specifically to the Italian part, and to Corleone Junior High School (har, har) — in the hopes that he will get a better education. In typical sitcom fashion, he does get an education, though mostly from the wise-ass, if not predictable, bully, a rotund redhead with a posse, scripted to make Chris' educational experience explicitly miserable.

The show's soundtrack, a collection of early-'80s classics, adds some comic relief to this comically overplayed senario. While Chris and his redheaded nemesis fight after school the anthem "Eye of the Tiger" plays. After a bit, the song melts into "Ebony and Ivory," a song as painful as any schoolyard punch, as the picked-on Chris is one of few black kids in predominantly white Corleone Junior High.

Back at home, Chris' parents, tough and hopeful (Tichina Arnold and Terry Crews, respectively), fret about money and struggle to keep the family out of the projects. They're the picture of your average working-class family, trying to do well and raise good kids in a tough neighborhood — which is atypical, and consequently refreshing, for prime-time television.

Rock, who narrates the action in voice-over tracks, is able to carry much of the spunk and bite of his stand-up routine into the script. When discussing his unsafe neighborhood, Rock says, "Like rock 'n' roll, school shootings were also invented by blacks and stolen by the white man." In the pilot episode, Narrator-Rock is able to offer his trademark bite along with some refreshing commentary on childhood chores, racial tensions and the parent-child bond.

What's most impressive about "Everybody Hates Chris" is that it's evenhanded. It doesn't pass judgment on anyone, even the bullies who torment Chris. It does, however, offer a perspective that's not often heard on TV, that of the working class African-American teenager. And, at least in the pilot, it even feels authentic.

"Everybody Hates Chris" is family-friendly, but it doesn't detract considerably from Rock's usual profanity-drenched style of (brutally) honest comedy. Rather, the scope of the show's humor is broadened, and allows the coming-of-age tale to speak to the general experiences of growing up. Not everyone had to take two buses to school and not everyone grew up in urban Brooklyn, but everyone was once a confused 13-year-old, caught between childhood and adulthood, and squirming to figure out a sense of self-hood in between. Everybody can hate Chris, that is, if anybody can really find it in themselves to hate him in the first place.

Looking to the future of this new prime-time must-see, it's easy to wonder how close it will stay to telling Rock's autobiography. How will the positive-familial atmosphere of "Everybody Hates Chris" handle Rock's choice to drop out of high school in the tenth grade? Will it even tell that story? Or, more importantly, will it stay in production long enough to get to that point in his life?

Hopefully, by keeping Rock's trademark punch in his stories about drinking punch, it will. And if it doesn't, at least it'll give Rock something else to be bitter about in his caustic stand-up routine.

— Tamara Watkins (tamara dot watkins at gmail dot com)