While Chris's family is much more functional than Roseanne's clan, it, too, etches a vivid portrait of a family struggling to get by, as when Rochelle explains to Julius the "debt system" of paying bills. But most of the humor is universal, from Chris's life-changing discovery of his father's Playboy magazine to his anxiety over Picture Day at school. Everybody Hates Chris also manages to show the love without being mawkishly sentimental. In the pilot, narrator Rock notes that his father didn't express his feelings, but as he was only one of four fathers on the block, his "'I'll see you in the morning' meant he'd be coming home. And that was his way of saying, 'I love you.'" --Donald Liebenson