Why ‘Everybody Still Hates Chris’ Had to be Animated
Reboots and sequels are not just unsurprising in 2024, they are expected. It doesn’t matter how popular or little-known a show or movie is, chances are good that it will return. What makes “Everybody Still Hates Chris” singular, however, is that it comes back with not just a new look but a new medium. “I would not have pursued this if it was a live-action reboot, it was the animated part that was appealing,” showrunner Sanjay Shah told IndieWire.
A big reason for developing this reboot of the 2005 sitcom “Everybody Hates Chris” (loosely inspired by the childhood of comedian Chris Rock) as an animated series was exploring the neighborhood. For Shah, who has worked in both live-action and animation, it was an opportunity for different character pairings than we’ve seen before, to push within fantasy sequences, and to see beyond the main Bed–Stuy neighborhood. For Shah, that possibility was exciting, as the original couldn’t really go to other locations — he cited an episode where the family is trying to go on vacation outside of New York City but ends up stuck at a bus station, but “now we can see them take that trip.”
From the start, “Everybody Still Hates Chris” feels out of time, not just because of the ’80s setting and the lack of phones and internet, but the look of the neighborhood. There’s a painterly quality to the realism of backgrounds and production design that evokes ’80s and even ’90s cartoons like “Hey Arnold,” which made their locations feel like real places where people live. The animation team at Eye Animation Productions recreated the look of Brooklyn in the ’80s, down to the street signs and the buses. Part of the goal for the animated reboot was to evoke the time the show is set in. The ’80s was a notorious time for animation, with budget cuts and limited animation being widespread, so for Shah it was an opportunity to make an elevated ’80s cartoon, to evoke the realism of a cartoon-like “King of the Hill” and how it felt like live-action but drawn, while echoing the original “Everybody Hates Chris” and its penchant for stretching reality through fantasies, cutaways, and exaggerated moments, and to augment the world through animation.
Even simpler things that break realism or the practicality of live-action (like a kid falling into the sewer in the second episode) can be done comedically only in animation. (According to Shah, that storyline also originally had a scene where that same kid met some radioactive turtles.) But animation doesn’t just stretch the imagination into the impossible for comedic effect, it also allows the animators to express things even live-action actors can’t, like extreme emotion. “Even if it’s just all of a sudden the backdrop goes away and it’s a color card expressing emotion, we can do things in animation that we couldn’t otherwise.”
Making “Everybody Still Hates Chris” in 2024 doesn’t mean updating the characters or storie. As Shah tells it, the goal was always to continue as if these were episodes made back in the 2000s, with the one big signal that this is a modern production being adult Chris Rock’s voiceover. Just like in the original version, Rock interjects from time to time, talking over his young fictional counterpart and commenting on the plot. While the stories show yesterday, Rock’s narration, and therefore the show at large, can talk from today. “The ’80s were a harbinger of things to come, from economic disparity to the rise of right-wing rhetoric,” Shah explained, so showing the ’80s as it was works just as well with regards to commenting on today than if the setting was a contemporary one.
The show also eschews serialization. Binge-watching and streaming have made serialization the norm, but “Everybody Still Hates Chris” is relishing that every episode is its own thing. “Ultimately, what I am showing up for as an audience is the characters, the family, and we wanted to show more of that,” Shah said. “I think there’s also a yearning for you to drop in any time, without a huge barrier to entry where you have to watch this whole season to understand what everyone’s talking about today, and that was part of the charm of the original.”
That being said, there is one big serialized element, which is that the animated reboot quite literally picks up where the original left off, with Chris receiving his GED results and realizing he failed. That causes his mom to literally slap him so hard everything turns into animation. “That required a lot of thought and talking to Chris, but we realized that there was still some cushion to tell stories when taking into account events from his real life,” Shah said. Part of the goal in bringing these characters back was to use a “floating timeline” like “The Simpsons,” where it feels like time is passing and the characters are going through changes, but they are still stuck where they began. “I wanted to trap Chris in this period of time where he’s still a Black Charlie Brown, before his road to fame begins,” Shah added. “That’s what we were trying to accomplish here.”
“Everybody Still Hates Chris” premieres September 25 on Comedy Central.
