TVSquad

(S02E07) I've said before that while Everybody Hates Chris doesn't stray too far from the sitcom template, it at least gives the genre its own funky twist, making it one of very few sitcoms I'll actually watch.

For example, have you ever noticed that when a person becomes class president on TV, they tend to wield more power than any class president in real life would have? Someone gets elected, and suddenly the whole school is changed. Chris actually believes he has this kind of power, but learns too late he can't keep all the promises he made while running (fall and winter vacations, book reports only for books based on movies, etc). Chris may be the first black president the school has ever had, but he's also the first president to be impeached.

(S02E06) This episode marked the first appearance of Jason Alexander as the new school principal, a man who took some time off after assaulting a faculty member and has now re-invented himself as a kind of enigmatic guru of sorts.

Alexander's character only appears in the first part of the episode, but by the end we learn he was with Chris and Joey the whole time, at least, he had somebody watching after them when they become lost in New York City. It turns out his plan to make Chris and his bully understand one another didn't quite have the affect he had hoped, though.

(S02E05)

Malvo: It's hard to rob a gun store. They got guns.

This wasn't one of the funniest episodes of Everybody Hates Chris I've seen, though I chalk that up to the show having a somewhat more serious point to make than other episodes. Chris, after being allowed to tend the corner market for the first time by himself, ends up robbed by the neighborhood's repeat offender, a thug named Malvo who's constantly in and out of jail.

(S02E04)

Chris Rock: Who knew the secret for a guy getting girls was for a guy to get a girl?

I have a friend who came up with the somewhat gauche term "girlfriend stink" to describe that air of confidence a guy has when he's in a relationship that suddenly makes him attractive to women who normally would want nothing to do with him. Chris finds out what that's all about when rumors start to circulate around the neighborhood that he and Tasha, the new girl next door, are dating. Chris figures as long as he responds to every query with "hey, well, you know..." he's safe, since it's a noncommittal answer, but really he just doesn't want anyone to think he's a loser who can't get any girls. Apparently he doesn't realize he's the star of a sitcom about how much it sucks to be a teenager.

Fans of Everybody Hates Chris know that Chris' mother, Rochelle, is a woman who doesn't take any BS from anyone, a "ghetto snob" who isn't afraid to tell you exactly how she feels, and often at full volume. In fact, sometimes she can be -- what's the word I'm looking for? Oh right, a total bitch. That's okay, though, it makes her character stand out from the crowd and creates a nice dynamic between herself and the rest of the family.

As I've said in my reviews of the series, Everybody Hates Chris is highly fictionalized, but as Hunter S. Thompson attempted to demonstrate in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, sometimes fiction can reveal something that's even truer than the truth.

(S02E03) This episode, in which Chris runs for class president, borrowed plenty of quotes from famous speeches about race and race relations. Chris tells his best friend and campaign manager Greg he plans to beat Joey Caruso "by any means necessary," a clever nod to Malcolm X. Later, during a Q&A with the school body Caruso answers every question with a variation of Alabama governor George Wallace's infamous "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" line from his 1963 inaugural speech. When asked what flavor of Jello should be in the cafeteria, he answers: "grape today, grape tomorrow, grape forever." When asked about handicap access, he just repeats the quote with "ramps" in place of "grapes." After swiping the speech Greg wrote for Chris and presenting it as his own at a school assembly, Caruso rattles off quotes from both Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, a stark contrast to his own racist outlook.

(S02E02) I still love this show, so let me get one minor negative thing out of the way right now: is it just me, or did the character of Rochelle, Chris' mom, seem like a real bitch in this episode? I understand she's a high-spirited "ghetto snob" with a tendency to overreact, but this is the first time watching the show when I actually started to dislike the character. When Julius comes home from the doctor and tells her he has high blood pressure and needs to find ways to reduce stress, she goes off on him about the fact that she's the one who's stressed, not him. Julius, as always, just goes along with it, not wanting to exacerbate the situation. Typically, this dynamic is hilarious, but in this episode it just didn't work for me, and Rochelle just came across as cruel while Julius seemed like more of a milquetoast than usual. Of course, another way to look at it is that I'm becoming more involved with the characters, which could be seen as a good thing. Like everything else, it's all in how you frame it.

(S02E01)

Keisha, Chris' unrequited love, is getting ready to move out of Brooklyn:

Chris: Hey, where y'all movin' to?

Keisha: We're going to this place in California. It's supposed to be really, really nice. Palm trees, and lawns, and no violence and no crime.

Chris: Well, what's it called?

Keisha: Compton.

The second season of Everybody Hates Chris kicks off on October 1 at 7pm. Here's a brief look at what you can expect in the season opener, "Everybody Hates Rejection," and no worries, I'm not going to give anything away.

First of all, Whoopi Goldberg guest stars as the family's new nosy next door neighbor, Louise, but you already knew that. Louise and Chris' mom Rochelle are at odds over how to deal with the escalating crime in the neighborhood while Chris finds himself attracted to Evette, a new girl at school who turns out not to be the angel he imagined her to be.

Ever since getting a Tivo a little over a year ago, I no longer watch TV shows when they actually air. When I'm not catching up with what's on my recorder, I'm either reading, listening to podcasts, or pounding out a blog post about what I'm watching on television. The big deletion from my Tivo Season Pass this year is House. I still admire the show, but for me the magic is gone. The season opener sat on my Tivo for quite a few days, unwatched. When I finally sat down to view it I realized, about fifteen minutes into it, that I had completely lost interest in it. I didn't even finish the episode, and took it off my Tivo for good. Perhaps my attitude will change in the coming weeks, but who knows? Anyway, some of these shows are winding down their current seasons, some have yet to air. All times are Central because I live in Minnesota.

CBS will be airing a special on September 2 titled A Day in the Life of Television: A Museum of Radio and Television Special. The show will take a behind-the-scenes look at twelve popular series:

• Entertainment Tonight
• Everybody Hates Chris
• The Simpsons
• CSI
• The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson
• CBS Evening News
• The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (the hell?)
• Today
• ER
• Ellen
• TRL
• Syracuse Local News on WSTM (also, the hell?)

This sounds like it could be interesting, and MTR interviews, which you can sometimes catch on television and often on the "special features" portion of many DVDs, are always very informative. You can check out some video here. Although there's only about two shows on the list above I really care about, at least they're offering a wide variety for everyone, so one can't complain too much. The special will air at 8 pm.