As some of you may or may not know, I watch a lot of Nick At Nite. Why is this, you may ask? I enjoy watching light and relatively harmless sitcoms at night before I go to bed, or so I can write incomprehensible gibberish like this. Believe it or not, I think this is the best time for sitcoms. Well, that and the morning hours. Anyway, I've noticed something strange while watching it recently.
When the show Everybody Hates Chris was announced for the block, I rolled my eyes. This show was made based on the success of Malcolm In The Middle and looked like nothing more than a cash in, Malcolm In The Middle is a show that always rubbed me the wrong way, and until recently I could never figure out why. The previews Nick showed for Chris didn't help either. But then I gave it a chance as I always do for N@N shows, and this is the weird part.
I liked it.
This confused me greatly; a show with a very similar layout and characterization (the hateful mom, misunderstood kid, and adjusting to the world around them), and it is the clearly superior show? Yes, easily.
Everybody Hates Chris
I won't throw this to the 'better writing' bin as I usually do. The quality of writing on the two shows is actually very similar, the acting is better on Chris but Malcolm is no slouch either. So what's the difference? Why is Chris the clearly superior show and one I would rather watch if given the chance?
Well, I struggled a bit to figure it out. But the characters are actually likable in Chris. The first few episodes of Malcolm were fine in this aspect too, but something seemed to happen. The characters became unlikable, malicious, and caricature's of stereotypes. This is why Malcolm always frustrated me and why now people are realizing the show is not as great as they once thought. Reruns of this show unveil the hateful characters they are, and despite what the writers try to do (and they try some pretty neat things), it all falls apart simply because the characters are never likable.
It would be fine if it was like Seinfeld and Married With Children where we weren't made to care for them and the writing was built around that, but the writers keep telling us we're supposed to care about these characters, but never give us compelling reasons why with the characterizations.
In Chris, every character is a person. They aren't all one sided, or cardboard cut outs, and they aren't all out to screw someone over. In fact, characters rarely get mad at others without reasons (in Malcolm people scream for the hell of it), and frequently try to do the right things. I'm not saying characters never get like that in Chris, but I'm saying that it isn't blown up to eyerolling levels like in Malcolm.
In fact, thanks to this discovery, I can say that this was a large problem with a lot of late 90s/early 00s shows like That 70s Show, and even recent shows like The War At Home. If the audience is supposed to care for the predicaments of these characters, then don't they have to like them? I mean, for all my faults with Friends, this was never an issue for it, and probably a factor for it's success.
This might have been some sort of experiment left over from that era of making sitcoms 'badder' and 'more extreme', however without heart it's simply meaningless. The sitcom Titus was a dark show with heavy themes from the same era, but the writers NEVER made us stop caring about the characters, and never pushed them over the edge. There was a reason for everything they did, and it was better for it.
All I can say is that I'm truly thankful the era of empty, loud characters are over. It's just too bad we seem to be in the era of 'no characters at all'... I can't decide which is worse. Either the sitcom based on the latest trends (look, a Facebook joke!), Hollywood movies (You mean she's pregnant? And the guy's a loser? OMG!),or reheated leftovers from the early 90s. The sitcom is still is a bad way, but it doesn't seem like this is a problem with them anymore.
