Julius Rocks (0)
Posted 27 October, 2005 in TV and movies and that
At 8pm I shall watch Everybody Hates Chris. If you haven’t seen it, the show’s about the comedian Chris Rock’s childhood in Bed-Stuy. Chris narrates the show, but doesn’t appear in it. In the show he’s around 11 years old. He lives with his brother, sister, mom, and Dad. Mostly the show is about all the trouble he gets into: a skinny kid named Fat Mike steals his new bike even though his mom said not to let anyone ride it; his mom makes him go to the white public school and he gets beat up all the time by a fat redheaded Italian kid named Joey; and he gets put on the basketball team and nicknamed Swish even though he doesn’t know how to play the game. I like the show because it’s not relentlessly cheerful like a lot of sitcoms are. Everyone is stressed out all the time; people deliberately annoy each other; nothing ever quite works out perfectly. All the characters are always poking at one another and being irritating and selfish and snarky, or just plain grumpy–sort of like people are in real life. It’s got warmth, though, too; the family is close, despite not drooling all over one another or expressing their love in hackneyed TV pronouncements.
But the best character on the show is Julius, Chris’s dad. He’s played by Terry Crews, a big hulk of a guy with a shaven head. He is a good person, but the effort of being one makes him super tense. He works two jobs and is ridiculously organized, and when his truck driving union goes on strike, he cleans the entire house and cooks dinner because he can’t stand not to be working. He putters around in a boiler suit and takes naps with his socks on in the afternoons when he works the night shift. He’s a real dad, not a dumb sitcom dad–he loves Mom and still thinks she’s sexy, but he’s also completely terrified of pissing her off; he yells sometimes and scares the crap out of everyone; he has a silly sense of humor and goes easier on the kids than Mom does; he’s always slightly distracted; and he has little old-mannish habits like falling asleep in chairs. And he’s proud of being a good dad and providing for his kids. I love Julius.
This week, Chris is persuaded to dress as Prince, circa Purple Rain, for Halloween. I hope they make Julius dress up too.