Everybody Hates Chris: Cast Photo - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Everybody Hates Chris aired from September 2005-? o UPN and The CW.

In this wry semiautobiographical comedy actor/comedian Chris Rock , as narrator, related the experiences of a young African-American growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980's. Chris ( played on-screen by Tyler James Williams) was 13 in 1982 when his parents pulled him out of the school in his tough Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood and sent him to Corleone Junior High School ( two hours away by bus) where he was the only black. Chris' family struggled to make ends meet and his father, Julius ( Terry Crews), worked multiple jobs to support them. Chris' formidable mother Rochelle ( Tachina Arnold) watched every penny and was determined to see her children succeed. Drew ( Tequan Richmond), his tall, confidant younger brother , was much more carefree than the somewhat neurotic Chris while kid sister Tonya ( Imani Hakim), the apple of their parents' eyes delighted in tormenting both her brothers. Chris' best friend at school , nerdy insecure Greg ( Vincent Martella), tried to help him with his problems but with little success. Their nemesis was Caruso ( Travis T. Flory), the school bully who regularly beat them up. Living in Bedsty were Keisha ( Aree Davis), the cute neighbor girl on whom Chris had a crush; Jerome ( Kevontay Jackson), the tough kid who took money from everybody; Risky ( Mike Estime), a dealer in mostly defective stolen merchendise; Doc ( Antonio Fargas)who ran a local grocery store; Rochelle's sexy girlfriend Vanessa ( Jackee Harry); and Mr. Omar ( Ernest Thomas), the boarder Rochelle had taken in to make a little extra money. Ms. Morello ( Jacqueline Mazarella) was Chris' math teacher.

A Review from Variety

Everybody Hates Chris
(Series -- UPN, Thurs. Sept. 22, 8 p.m.)
By PHIL GALLO

Taped in Los Angeles by Chris Rock Enterprises and 3 Arts Entertainment in association with Paramount Network Television. Executive producers, Michael Rotenberg, Dave Becky, Howard Gewirtz, Chris Rock, Ali LeRoi; producer, Jim Michaels; director, Reginald Hudlin; writer, LeRoi; story, Rock, LeRoi.

Julius - Terry Crews
Rochelle - Tichina Arnold
Drew - Tequan Richmond
Tonya - Imani Hakim
Greg - Vincent Martella
Chris - Tyler James Williams
Narrator - Chris Rock

UPN has a created a laugh-out-loud show capable of broadening the netlet's demographics but scheduled it where it risks being stomped by the competish. Appeal of Chris Rock should bring some new eyeballs to UPN, but there are too many viewers addicted to CBS' "Survivor," ABC's "Alias" and Fox's "The OC" for show to approach breakout-hit status in this slot. And that's a pity, as this pilot proves it could be a "Wonder Years" for a new generation.
This is Rock telling his story as a 13-year-old in 1982, moving to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and being sent to a nearly all-white school in Brooklyn.

Chris (Tyler James Williams) is a small, bookish kid with posters of young rap acts on his bedroom walls; in his make-believe world, he dresses like Run-DMC and is revered by the nightclub crowd for being, well, Chris.

Williams plays Chris with a bit of wide-eyed wonder combined with some unnatural self-confidence: No matter what the situation, he's a man with a plan.

Reality, however, finds Chris with these responsibilities: Keep his nose clean in school and do well (that plan is halted by a bully) and make sure his father's sleep is not interrupted and that he gets up at 5 p.m. to go to work. That prompts some good physical comedy.

His siblings are there to get him in trouble or make him feel bad about himself. Brother Drew (Tequan Richmond) is younger but taller, and he more easily catches the eye of girls; sister Tonya (Imani Hakim) is the baby who always gets her way. It's the parents, though, who steal the show.

Rochelle (Tichina Arnold) is a riot, especially when it comes to scolding. And Julius, played by former NFL player Terry Crews, has an exacting presence, constantly reminding everyone how much everything costs and how wasteful they are. Together they bewilder the kids and keep them scared, especially Chris. It's old-school parenting.

Reginald Hudlin directs with a pleasant swiftness and an attention to detail that brings out the best of the humor. Ali LeRoi's script sets the bar rather high for future episodes, but by keeping scenarios simple and building around them, "Chris" has built a solid foundation.

A Review from The New York Times

TV Review | 'Everybody Hates Chris'
A Boy Grows in Brooklyn, With a Voice-Over

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 22, 2005

Comedians are angry people. Everybody knows that. And that is why "Everybody Hates Chris" on UPN is such a surprise. Chris Rock's new series, a memoir that he narrates, paints an affectionately wry portrait of a 13-year-old growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.

The show is not subversively funny or profane the way Mr. Rock's stand-up routines usually are. Instead, it is charming.

Whatever it was that shaped Mr. Rock's comic persona, it wasn't hate or neglect.

Humiliation, however, must have played a part. Tyler James Williams plays Chris and is delightful in the part of the eldest child who is saddled with the role of "emergency adult" to his younger, cooler brother, Drew (Tequan Richmond), and bratty baby sister, Tonya (Imani Hakim). Worst of all, his mother thinks the local school "breeds hoodlums," and she forces him to take two buses to one in an Italian neighborhood where he is the only African-American. "Those white kids, they get an education," she says in a voice that brooks no contradiction.

On the show, the school is named "Corleone Junior High School."

Chris's parents are loving but strict, and they don't have much money. When Chris, famished because a bully stole his lunch money, comes home from school and eats his father's big piece of chicken, there isn't anything else in the fridge.

There are no perfect childhoods on television anymore. By the 1970's and 80's, father not only did not know best, he was often dead. On many of the most popular sitcoms, from "One Day at a Time" to "Full House," at least one parent was absent. Nowadays, the fashion has swung back toward two parents raising their children under one roof, but the adults tend to be nutty and dysfunctional, as on "Malcolm in the Middle" or "Everybody Loves Raymond." (On that show, the adults were the children; Ray's small fry were basically props.)

And there is still an appetite for shows about single parents: on "Two and a Half Men," a divorced father moves in with his bachelor brother, and together they raise his son.

By contrast, "Everybody Hates Chris" is almost a throwback to "The Cosby Show," a series where even teenagers respect and appreciate their parents. "The Cosby Show" was considered a breakthrough in the 80's because it defied the stereotypes of "The Jeffersons" to depict an upper-middle-class black family. Chris's parents are not doctors or lawyers, and their neighborhood is at the center of the crack epidemic. "Much like rock 'n' roll, school shootings were also invented by blacks and stolen by the white man," Mr. Rock says in a voice-over.

His father, Julius (Terry Crews), works several jobs, including driving a truck at night, and his mother, Rochelle (Tichina Arnold), has a part-time clerical job. Chris feels oppressed at home and at school, but he understands why his parents are so strict. He is resigned to their foibles, not resentful.

His father is frugal. He can calculate the cost of wasted food or electricity down to the last penny, and does so at the top of his voice. "That's 49 cents of spilled milk dripping off my table," he hollers at no one in particular. "Somebody is going to drink that milk."

Chris's mother has an even more menacing way with her children. Warning her boys that she never wants to catch them spray painting graffiti on a wall, she says, "I'll put my foot so far up your behinds you'll have toes for teeth." Another time, she says, "I will slap the caps off of your knees."

Most comedies about the collision of parents and children are set in cozy middle-class America, where the adults are the protagonists at war with children who roll their eyes, talk back and fearlessly mock their parents' values. "Everybody Hates Chris" is the first show in a long time centered on a teenager whose main problem is not adolescent angst, but real life.

And Mr. Rock makes it funny, not maudlin or mean.

Everybody Hates Chris

UPN, tonight at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.

Created by Chris Rock and Ali LeRoi; Howard Gewirtz, Michael Rotenberg, Dave Becky, Mr. Rock and Mr. LeRoi, executive producers; narrated by Mr. Rock. A Chris Rock Enterprises Inc. and 3 Arts Entertainment production in association with Paramount Network Television.

WITH: Tyler James Williams (Chris), Tichina Arnold (Rochelle), Terry Crews (Julius), Tequan Richmond (Drew), Imani Hakim (Tonya) and Vincent Martella (Greg).

A Review from The Tufts Daily

TV Review | 'Everybody Hates Chris' and for a good reason
Justin Chiumenti
Contributing Writer

Throughout the fifty-year history of sitcoms, every imaginable gimmick has been tried to add a new twist to the basic formula of familiar characters getting themselves into and out of hilarious predicaments.

Sitcom smash "M*A*S*H" (1972-1983) found something to laugh about in the Korean War, and "Seinfeld" (1990-1998), which billed itself as a show about nothing, will likely enjoy an equally long afterlife in syndication.

"Everybody Hates Chris," which premiered on UPN last Thursday, is a show about the early life of Chris Rock, narrated by Rock himself. Far from joining the two aforementioned classic TV shows in the history books, though, "Everybody Hates Chris" seems destined to be quickly forgotten.

The first episode profiles Chris (Tyler James Williams) and his family as they move out of the projects and into a new neighborhood. Chris has his hands full trying to fit in at his new school, and his parents are also busy trying to manage the kids and pay the bills.

The episode is full of plenty of Rock's classic one-liners and jabs. In describing his new school's neighborhood, for example, he explains: "Much like rock and roll, school shootings were also invented by blacks, and stolen by the white man." Rock recounts his schooling as "Not a Harvard-type education, just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store-type education."

Even when the narrative is at its funniest, however, the show boils down to Chris Rock doing a comedy routine with his own life as the subject. While Rock is funny during on-stage appearances, because this is a family show on UPN, drugs, sex and swearing are all excised from his regular comedic vocabulary. Add that to the fact that all of his jokes must relate to the specific slow-paced plotline, and the result is Chris Rock's voice with a decidedly un-Chris-Rock tone.

Damaging the show further, the writers seemingly forgot that sitcoms are supposed to be comedies about situations (hence, SITcom). "Seinfeld" was successful because in every episode it managed to build up a set of intertwined premises between Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, and then unravel them at the end in one climactic scene. Jerry's witticisms played second fiddle to the flow of the plot. This has been the case in scores of popular sitcoms, all the way from "I Love Lucy" (1951-1957) to "Friends" (1994-2004).

"Everybody Hates Chris" has it backwards. While the jokes are comical, the plot is anything but. As Chris starts attending his new all-white school, he trades harsh words with the school bully. The two have a fight after school and Chris laments messing up his new shoes, but predictably, everything turns out okay in the end, since he is able to clean them before his mom notices.

This series of events alone, without the omnipresent voice of Rock narrating, would not hold a viewer's attention past the first commercial. This is a boring show that Rock dubs over and adds jokes to, making it watchable and at some times funny, but no less inane.

If nowhere else, "Everybody Hates Chris" does a good job in one area - casting. Tichina Arnold, as Chris' mother Rochelle, is convincingly sassy as a mother trying to balance working with raising her kids. When Chris' brother Drew (Tequan Richmond) asks why he is wearing his new shoes to school, Rochelle snaps, "'Cause you only have one pair of feet."

Terry Crews, as Rock's father Julius, also turns in an agreeable performance as a penny-pinching and imposing father figure. Finding a half-eaten chicken wing in the garbage, he exclaims, "That's a dollar nine cent in the trash!" Still, the performance of the cast members alone isn't enough to make up for the failures of the writers.

As long as Rock is able to punctuate the boredom of the actual show with his post-production commentary, "Everybody Hates Chris" will not be a show entirely devoid of merit. However, without the traditional setup of clever, entertaining storylines, it is unclear how long this "sitcom" will keep anyone's attention.

An Article from Time Magazine

A Tale of Two Sitcoms
Saturday, Sep. 17, 2005 By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

The Cosby question--he's heard it before. Chris Rock knows his history well enough to know the parallel: in 1984 a black comic turned his stand-up act into a fresh-voiced family comedy that revived the sitcom genre when, like now, pundits were reading it the last rites. But suggest that UPN's Everybody Hates Chris, which Rock created and narrates, could be today's Great Black Hope, and the comic waxes unphilosophical. "If it's good, it'll work. If not, it won't work." Shrug. Silence. Move on.

The writers of NBC's My Name Is Earl likewise claim to feel little pressure to save a multibillion-dollar business. They just want to get the smoking episode done. In it, Earl Hickey (Jason Lee)--a ne'er-do-well trying to make amends to everyone he has ever wronged--resolves to quit cigarettes. NBC executives have asked for rewrites to make Earl more "active." Shooting is due to start in two days, so the staff of a dozen settles into comfy chairs in the writers' room, downs bottled water and bats around the problem: How can someone actively not do something? Finally, they hit on it. Earl's brother and his friend will kidnap him to force him to confront his task.

The fix works. But the TV business is hoping for a much bigger fix from Chris and Earl, the two funniest new shows of the fall. NBC began two decades of sitcom dominance with The Cosby Show. Last year--when, among other disappointments, Joey lost much of the Friends audience--it fell from first to fourth place in key advertising demographics. "You can't ignore that the stakes are high for NBC for this show," says Earl creator Greg Garcia. "They're excited because they need something to work." UPN, meanwhile, has unsubtly telegraphed its hopes for Chris. It will run Thursdays at 8, Cosby's old time slot on the most profitable night of TV, in the hope of turning the small network from a perpetual joke into a rival to the Big Four.

There's an opening for both shows, if they can take it. Something funny has been happening on TV lately--or, more accurately, hasn't. Everybody Loves Raymond, which signed off in May, was the last sitcom in the top-10 most-watched TV shows. In the 1996-97 season, there were seven. That might not matter, except that sitcoms are TV's cash cow: they do better in reruns and sell for far more money in syndication.

The problem is, there's no simple explanation for TV's laugh lack. "It just doesn't make sense," says Kevin Reilly, NBC's president of entertainment. "The feeling is that America needs to laugh now more than ever." And it does laugh--just not together. Viewers, especially younger ones, seem to be bored with laugh-track sitcoms. But the fresher shows--cable comedies, cartoons, even reality shows--often turn off less adventurous viewers. The key, it seems, is to find the Goldilaughs spot in between, to be original yet familiar.

CSI and Desperate Housewives did that for drama and soaps. But a genre show can hook viewers fast through sensational plots. Guy gets drugged by a hooker--bang, you got 30 million people's attention. Sitcoms depend on gradual bonding with characters, and today's networks, part of media conglomerates, want instant hits. "Laughs are in characters, and no time is being given to establishing them," says Phil Rosenthal, creator of Raymond, which--like Seinfeld and Cheers--had poor ratings its first season.

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?'"

Garcia knows about traditional sitcoms too. He co-created CBS's Yes, Dear, the 10K gold standard for mediocre, safe family comedy. But in the early-morning hours, before heading to the office, he began working on a script about a petty thief who has a scheming wife (Jaime Pressly). He wins $100,000 in the lottery, immediately gets hit by a car, then decides it's all a sign he must fix his Karma. Earl made the rounds of networks, which praised it but passed. Then Reilly took the reins at NBC, with a reputation (from heading edgy cable network FX) for boldness and the mandate to find the next thing--anything--that would work. "I felt it was inventive and original," says Reilly. "It had a great American theme: redemption." NBC conditioned the deal on getting a strong lead. It pursued Lee (Almost Famous), who had no interest in doing TV until his manager made him read the script. "It wasn't what I was expecting," he says. "It didn't read like a TV show."

Indeed. Although NBC is the bigger, more established network, Earl (Tuesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) is more nontraditional than Chris. It has the deadpan, off-kilter feel of a Coen brothers movie (specifically, Raising Arizona). And whereas TV sitcoms, led by NBC's, have become relentlessly upscale, Earl is like the anti-Frasier: "Ain't no use runnin', fool!" Earl tells a guy in a bar. "I know where your momma parks your house!" But like Chris, Earl has a gigantic, unsentimental heart. Lee plays the lead with a dazed, beatific air, like a man who's just been hit with a frying pan but realizes he probably deserved it. There's something sweet and innocent about his inept quest for purity--even if he gets the idea from watching Carson Daly while in a hospital bed, whacked out on morphine.

As faltering as the sitcom genre is, do the masses want one that "doesn't read like TV"? Plenty of inventive shows of late have looked like the savior of the sitcom--Bernie Mac, Scrubs--until the viewers failed to materialize. But sitcoms are due for a comeback, and for the first season in recent memory, most of the best-looking fall pilots are comedies (see box). (Don't worry, there are plenty of stinkers too, including an atrocious star vehicle for Freddie Prinze Jr.) And it often takes an unusual show to revive a TV genre--even Cosby was radical for being a family comedy where the adults were smarter than the kids. What matters more than how different a sitcom is, how many cameras it uses or which famous person is in it is whether it has a voice, which is a fancy way of saying that it sounds like itself, not a network committee. Earl and Chris have voice to spare. Are you listening? --With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

An Article from The Evansville Courier & Press

Everybody Hates Chris' takes punches, keeps going

* Posted May 19, 2008 at midnight

HOLLYWOOD — Life at Tattaglia High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., can be tough. Homework, heartbreak and, on this day, a red-haired bully is on the loose, determined to torment unsuspecting nerds.

Amid the hallway chaos, though, stands a grown-up wearing a white head scarf and gym shorts, with a valuable lesson to impart to the nerds — how to take a bully's punch. The idea is to heighten the laughs for a scene being filmed on the set of "Everybody Hates Chris," the nostalgic Chris Rock-inspired sitcom about a Brooklyn teenager growing up in the 1980s.

The adult is Ali LeRoi, who created the CW series with Rock and coaches the young actors on how best to move through the scene — a comically tense encounter involving young Chris (Tyler James Williams), his best friend Greg (Vincent Martella) and Joey the bully (Travis Flory).

LeRoi is a TV rarity, a show runner guiding one of the few remaining series on network television dealing with black Americans. This, depending on whom you talk to, is a woeful or an encouraging development.

Although Chris and his friends still might be experiencing growing pains, the series — currently filming its fourth season for airing this fall, in a move to Friday nights from Sundays — is not, according to LeRoi.

"If we were a basketball team, we would be in the playoffs," said LeRoi, sitting in his office beneath a huge French poster from Spike Lee's "Bamboozled," a satire about black comedies.

LeRoi speaks like a seasoned veteran as he acknowledges that "Everybody Hates Chris" has taken its share of punches since its 2005 debut. Once trumpeted as a breakout hit, the show has struggled through slipping ratings, marketing woes and network upheaval.

Moreover, "Everybody Hates Chris" is a show with a predominantly black cast in an era when black-themed series appear to be at a crossroads.

"From our perspective, this was never about being a black show," says LeRoi. "The interests of Chris and I are broad and eclectic. The foundation is reflective of our influences, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith. It's broad and global. It's about family, a slice of life."

LeRoi feels his show will stand the test of time.

"In the long run, this show will endure," he said. "We're not going away."

An Article about the end of Chris

Rock plans to end 'Everybody Hates Chris'

09/04/2009 - 12:15:42
Funnyman Chris Rock is planning to end the TV show based on his early life after four seasons.

'Everybody Hates Chris' hasn't been picked up for a fifth season and the comedian plans to make it easy for bosses at America's CW network by ending the current season with a fitting finale.

Actor Terry Crews, who plays Rock's dad in the series, said: "Chris Rock didn't graduate high school and started comedy when he was, like, 17 years old. Our Chris (Tyler James Williams) is now a sophomore in high school, so the timing is lining up pretty well. Once he becomes a comedian, the show's over."

And Williams, who is currently pursuing a film course at New York University, admits he's happy with the ending of the show, which is unofficially planned for May 8.

He told TV Guide magazine: "An envelope arrives (with his high-school equivalency results), but before we find out the results, we fade to black. If it ends here, we ended it the right way."

Rock agrees: "It might not be a bad way to go."

Here is Johnny Palerno's Obituary

'Everybody Hates Chris' Actor Dies in Car Accident

Friday, June 12, 2009 at 03:48 PM
A 27-year-old actor was killed in a car accident on Monday night along with his girlfriend who was reportedly driving the vehicle.

Johnny Palermo, who had a recurring role on Nichelodeon's Just for Kicks as well as the CW show Everybody Hates Chris, has died. Various media reports are stating the actor's girlfriend, Alessandra Giangrande, was driving in North Hollywood, California when the accident happened.

Giangrande was also killed, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Another person was in the car with the two and seated in the back seat. It is still unclear if the man was Giangrande's or Palermo's brother since the victim has been reported as both in various news articles. That man reportedly survived the crash, though he's suffering from serious injuries.

According to IMDB.com, Palermo appeared in more than 30 television shows and is probably best known for his work on Everybody Hates Chris, a sitcom that appears on the CW channel that is produced and narrated by Emmy Award-winning comedian Chris Rock.

Palermo played the character of Frank DiPaolo during the 2006 season. The young actor filmed a scene for the movie Pizza with Bullets as Young Don Vito, which is scheduled to come out sometime this year.ADNFCR-1918-ID-19217703-ADNFCR

To watch clips from Everybody Loves Chris go to http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=everybody+hates+chris&aq=f

For a Website dedicated to Everybody Hate's Chris go to http://web.archive.org/web/20080614044531/http://www.everybodyhateschris.org/

For a page devoted to Tyler James Williams go to http://www.teenstarsonline.com/tylerj_williams.html

For a Review of Everybody Hates Chris go to http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/Everybody-Hates-Chris.html