A Tale of Two Sitcoms

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