Another early look, this one courtesy of an "exclusive" DVD -- exclusive to me and anyone else who bought this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly, that is. The show premieres Thursday, 9/22 on UPN, in another of the season's most competitive timeslots (Alias, The O.C., Survivor, Joey/Will & Grace, Smallville).
UPN has very high hopes for this sitcom, expecting it to be their first breakout hit, and maybe even the show that pushes them past the WB into 5th place among the networks. It's basically the Chris Rock version of The Wonder Years, a look back at Rock's childhood in Brooklyn.
It's 1982, and Chris is 13; the family's just moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood from the projects. Chris's younger brother and sister go to the local elementary school, but Chris has to take two buses to the junior high in Brooklyn Beach, where he's the only black kid, because his mother thinks he'll get a better education there than at the "hoodlum school" in their neighborhood. "Not a Harvard education," says Rock, who narrates each episode, "but at least a not-robbing-liquor-stores education."
The cast is terrific, and Tyler James Williams is immensely likable as Chris. Even better are Terry Crews and Tichina Arnold as his parents. His father, Julius, knows the cost of everything (to Chris at bedtime: "Unplug that alarm clock, boy. You can't tell time when you're sleeping. That's two cents an hour!"), but has no idea what sort of juggling his wife, Rochelle, goes through to decide when to pay which bills every month ("I run this house the way the government runs the country -- on a deficit.").
The jokes are funny, and the show is honest about the difficulty of being just barely in the working class (Julius works two jobs; Chris has to wear his brother's good shoes to school). It's stuck in a miserable timeslot, but it just might be as good a show as UPN thinks it is, and if it lives up to the first episode, it'll be well worth watching.
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