One of the biggest buzz shows for the new season is Everybody Hates Chris, Chris Rock narrating a fictionalization of his own childhood. And I can see why. It’s slickly produced, well acted, honest, and verging on touching.
But judging from the first episode, it’s also obvious, predictable, and not that funny.
It could become funny. It could build its rhythms that the viewer will invest in.
Young Chris is the eldest of three offspring of a loving-but-harsh mother and a loving-but-befuddled dad. He is bussing out of the generally dangerous Bed-Stuy to a common high-school danger-level high school a few neighborhoods over, where as the sole black face in the sea of white, he is the obvious target for what dangers exist. Being responsible for siblings he cannot control and dealing with the normal struggles of sliding into the teenage years, yes, yes, it’s all well and good. Heck, I can care about this character.
But it’s not dramatic enough to carry just on that. And this oen, anyway, was not funny enough to make it great. Watchable, yes, but I actually got more laughs out of each half hour of tonight’s season opener of Joey, a notoriously disappointing show.
Every year it seems there’s at least one or two shows that get so much pub and critical buzz that by the time it makes it on the air I’m already sick of it. For me, EHC is that show for the current season. It’s got too many personal strikes against it going in for me to even bother trying it:
1. I generally like my sitcoms in the more traditional sitcom-y vein. I’ve never been a fan of sitcoms with massive voiceover narration and my impression is that this one features that technique. As an aside, I’ve never been quite able to put my finger on just why I have this dislike that with sitcoms until just yesterday when it suddenly came to me… It’s too much like having to “explain” the joke. I prefer to get to know the characters and just simply “get” (through osmosis) why the jokes are funny. But voiceover narration makes it seem as if the writers feel they have to explain to dumb ol’ me exactly why the jokes are funny. And for me that added “explanation” does not enhance the “funny,” it usually detracts from it (if not outright kills it). The one exception I can think of to this was Police Squad in which the narration DID indeed enhance the humor for me, but that’s just the kind of wacky show it was.
2. I find the title just waaaay too apt. Not that I “hate” Chris Rock. But I’ve never found him funny either in my limited exposure. I usually just find him shrill and annoying. So even though he personally is not acting in the show, the fact that he’s doing the voiceover narration that I generally don’t like to begin with… well, that’s not a good thing for me.
3. What few promos I’ve seen/heard for the show have seemed to focus on the haranguing Mother harshly yelling at Chris to “clean the pee off the toilet seat!” (or something like that). If that’s among the best lines they can come up with for a promo and they think that it’s going to make me want to tune in, well, then they can keep on waitin’.
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All that being said, I did flip in and out on it two or three times during the half hour. I can’t say I gave it a fair chance, but what chance I did give it did not succeed in gluing my eyes to the set.
If I eventually hear enough recommendations for a show like this from personal friends who know me and they tell me they think I’ll like it, then I might check it out at some point. But until then, forget it.
A few seasons ago I had a similar reaction to Jake 2.0. In that instance it was just simply that UPN seemed to promote the (I’ll say…) “heck” out of it way too much during Buffy and just turned me off to it. But for some reason I actually did come to tune into the second episode of Jake (probably just because shows with some SF elements are generally “my thing”) and found I liked it after all. It wasn’t great, but I thought it was a fun concept done resonably well and showed signs of finding it’s footing with the characters along the way. Then it was cancelled anyway. Oh well.
My point is only that if a show is good enough it can overcome my personal backlash reaction to over-hype. But it’s rare. ER never managed to do it as I found myself hooked more by the lesser-promoted Chicago Hope that debuted the same season in the same time slot with more people involved whom I liked.
Lastly (since you brought it up) in watching Joey last night I was hoping to see some improvement in the show. I watched it last season just based on the Friends inertia factor. But last night’s season premiere pretty much stopped me cold on that. I think Joey’s disappearing from my “watch” list. I saw an ad earlier in the day for “Must-See TV Thursday” and I have to say it’s way past time for NBC to retire that slogan.
(Sorry, didn’t mean to drone on so. Sometimes I have a stream of unconsciousness.)