Chris Rock’s Sitcom Is Getting An Animated Reboot
It's coming back in a new medium!
Coming off of his whirlwind appearance at this year’s Academy Awards, actor and comedian Chris Rock may be looking for a bit of a win these days. After being slapped on national television for making an offbeat joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, Rock returned to his comedic roots by taking the stage on a comedy tour where he mostly stayed away from discussing the infamous slap seen ’round the world. Recently, Rock was hit with some good news as it appears a sitcom he worked on years ago is getting a reboot in a more modern fashion.
According to a report by Deadline, Chris Rock’s series Everybody Hates Chris is being rebooted as an animated show that will debut on Paramount+ and Comedy Central. The new show will be entitled Everybody Still Hates Chris, and like its predecessor, is a semi-autobiographical look at Rock’s upbringing through the lens of comedy. Rock will narrate the new show, just as he did for the original incarnation, and will also serve as an executive producer. The series is apparently still in development, so no casting announcements have been made yet regarding who will voice many of the diverse characters onscreen.
The original series that started it all, Everybody Hates Chris, debuted in 2005 on what was then the UPN Network. The series starred actor Tyler James Williams, who played a semi-fictionalized version of Chris Rock in his much younger years, set against a backdrop of the 1980s in Brooklyn, New York. Rock narrated the show with much hilarity, as the family sitcom dealt with many of Rock’s own teenage issues coming from a rougher gang-infested neighborhood while attending a public high school where there were barely any Black students. The series costarred Terry Crews as Chris’s caring but cheapskate father and Tichina Arnold as his harsh yet overprotective mother.
As CNN reported at the time, after the first season of Everybody Hates Chris, UPN merged with the WB to form one network now familiarly called The CW. The series lasted three more seasons on The CW before its eventual cancellation in May 2009. According to The Urban Daily, Chris Rock appeared to welcome the news of the initial series’ cancellation due to the fact that Rock himself never finished high school, and he felt that the semi-fictionalized character that Tyler James Williams portrayed on the show lined up with his true-to-life story.
In real life, Chris Rock began his comedy career at the age of 17, so it might be fitting if Everybody Still Hates Chris dives deeper into the start of the character’s comedy trajectory. Tyler James Williams has gone on to great success as of late, playing the character of Gregory Eddie on Abbott Elementary, a role that has seen the actor nominated this year for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Since Everybody Hates Chris went off the air, Rock has gone on to host the Academy Awards and was featured in several high-profile films such as Grown Ups, Grown Ups 2, and his directorial effort Top Five.
