A Tale of Two Sitcoms

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Viewers, however, already know Rock. And Chris is his story--sort of--based on his experience as a 13-year-old (played by Tyler James Williams) being bused to a white school in Brooklyn. (The school, Rock narrates, didn't offer a "Harvard-type education. Just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store-type education.") Rock's raunchy stand-up may not seem as if it would translate to prime time, but it has always been laced with values that stress family and personal responsibility. "They don't grade fathers," one line goes, "but if your daughter's a stripper, you f___ed up."

In Chris, Rock has created (with Ali LeRoi, a writer from Rock's HBO show) a sitcom that reflects who he is now: a caustic comic and a 40-year-old dad. Its setup is simple: Chris deals with two younger sibs (Tequan Richmond and Imani Hakim); a hard-nosed mom, Rochelle (Tichina Arnold); a hardworking but cheap dad, Julius (Terry Crews); and mean kids at school. He's always averting disaster: fixing the scuffs on his borrowed dress shoes, keeping his dad from getting woken up while he rests for the night shift. But the situations are more than just funny: they underscore that the family is living on the edge. The shoes are a big deal because the family can't afford a new pair; if Julius goes to work tired, he'll get fired. And the racism Chris encounters at school isn't sugarcoated--he gets called "Bojangles" and "nigger." But he bounces back--more, Rock admits, than he did in real life. "I was very introverted," he says. "When you get beat up in school and people call you 'nigger,' it doesn't exactly bring out your personality."

Chris, like Earl, is shot with a single camera and no audience; traditional sitcoms are taped with multiple cameras in a studio. Visually, single-camera shows look more like movies--more locations, fewer sets. Narratively, there are fewer wacky zingers and more realistic humor. Says LeRoi: "I didn't want the characters to be smarter than they are, saying witty things that writers write." Crews, for one, says he's glad to play a TV dad who's not a goofball. "There are millions of Juliuses everywhere," he says. "But on TV for the last few years, he has been underrepresented." And Rock--who doesn't run the show day to day but reads and revises scripts--says his inspirations are old-school sitcoms like Good Times. "It was a good show about poor people," he says. "Me and Ali go over the [Chris] scripts, and I swear I refer to Good Times and The Jeffersons more than to my real life. 'What would Weezie do?'"