'Everybody Hates Chris': Whuppin' With Laughter

If you like Chris Rock -- and you really ought to -- you should be more than happy with "Everybody Hates Chris," the comedian's wonderfully original and very funny new sitcom. The UPN series, premiering tonight at 8 on Channel 20, depicts Rock's growing-up years, so he doesn't appear on it, but he narrates it to great effect. And the whole speedy half-hour is suffused with his rueful-quirky-goofy sensibility.

"Before I was a comedian, I thought the coolest thing that would happen to me was to be a teenager," Rock muses at the outset of tonight's episode. "Boy, was I wrong."

His remembrance is interrupted by the first appearance of his mother, Rochelle (Tichina Arnold).

"Chris! Get in the bathroom and wipe the pee off the toilet seat! Disgusting!"

Rochelle is scary -- a rough customer, more than able to stand up to her penny-counting husband, Julius (Terry Crews). ("That's 49 cent of spilt milk dripping all over my table," he cries after a kitchen accident. "Somebody gonna drink this milk!") It's Rock's gift, and the show's, that the two are depicted affectionately, but it's always clear that they weren't easy people to be around.

Young Chris is played by Tyler James Williams, who really seems as if he could grow up to be Chris Rock. The character can be mouthy with people his age, but even when he's living stoically through a siege of adult oppression, you can see the wheels turning -- this kid is smart and cunning. And Williams is a true discovery.

Chris is the firstborn, but his brother, Drew (Tequan Richmond), is taller and "so cool, he got girls at 10 that I couldn't get till I was 30." Their little sister, Tonya (Imani Hakim) -- Dad's favorite -- rounds out the brood. "Since I was the oldest, I had to be the emergency adult," Rock tells us.

The story opens in 1982, "the year I turned 13," and Rochelle has engineered a move from the projects to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood turns out to be tougher than anybody realized, but Rochelle is ferociously determined that her three kids grow up the right way. Observing a graffiti artist at work, she announces, "If I ever catch any of y'all spraying on anybody's wall I'm gonna stick my foot so far up your behind, you'll have toes for teeth!"

Rock's narration sums it up: "She had a hundred recipes for whuppin' ass."

Rochelle's foot isn't the only threat to young Chris's behind. Disapproving of the nearby junior high, she sends her eldest to an otherwise all-white school in a distant part of the city where, he tells us, he could receive "not a Harvard-type education, just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store-type education." There he is beset by a pudgy and popular bully named Joey Caruso. "Nice shoes, Bojangles," the kid calls out to him -- an early salvo in what will become a very personal war.

Rock created the show with writer Ali LeRoi, and the two clearly cohabit the same wavelength. You could argue that the characters of Rochelle and Julius revert at times to stereotype, but only if you were determined to find fault. The cast is uniformly strong, and the foibled characters feel rooted in real life.

Through the history of the medium there have been classic TV families -- the Ricardos, the Petries, the Bunkers, the Huxtables, a few others. It's too early to say that the "Everybody Hates Chris" quintet will join that list. But it's a mark of the show's promise that the idea does come to mind.