In fiction, there's a concept called "suspension of disbelief". In order to enjoy the final product, an unwritten covenant exists between the creator and the consumer. The creator will be allowed to suspend the rules of reality within a restricted scope.
Take science fiction. Viewers watching "Spider-Man" will temporarily ignore the fact that a one-hundred fifty pound man can't swing through Manhattan on a thread, and viewers of "Star Wars" will ignore the absence of interstellar travel options at Delta Airlines. Every genre of fiction has these conventions. Soap operas expect betrayal and drama to happen at a rate thousands of times more frequently than expected in real life. Harlequin Romances expect smart, clever women to meet guys with pecs like Fabio.
Trangressions of this covenant, however, are punished severely. No, George Lucas, a bunch of walking teddy bears should not be able to defeat the massive intergalactic war machine. Aliens should not be speaking with Rastafarian accents. Seventy-year old men cannot mack on twenty-year old models -- I'm talking to you, Mr. W. Allen. The consumer says, "I'll accept this much of a violation of reality for you to tell a good story, but I expect restraint -- no more violations beyond what is absolutely necessary."
Even comedies have their various covenants. There are wacky comedies like the Austin Powers series, less wacky comedies like
Wedding Crashers and even less wackier comedy-dramas like Little Miss Sunshine. Since these covenants are never explicitly stated, the deal is usually sealed by watching the first few episodes of a serial comedy (or the trailer of a movie) -- "if you agree with these premises, we have a deal".
The premises of "Everybody Hates Chris" are fairly straightforward -- we thought. "Everybody Hates Chris" is sort of a coming-of-age comedy. The main character, Chris, suffers both through school (as the lone black kid in an all-white school) and at home, with his sometimes annoying family. There's a certain level of wackiness that is accepted -- the fact that Chris's teacher casually makes the most racist of statements, that Chris's mother Rochelle seems to be able to get jobs easily despite the fact that she must have quit hundreds of them by now, and that there is a suspicious lack of danger despite the fact that this is mid-80s Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Any real wackiness was limited to dream sequences which the narrator (Chris Rock) made clear were part of Chris's imagination. However..."Everybody Hates Houseguests" is a real rule-breaker of an episode.
The premise is that Chris's white friend Greg has his parents out of town for a week, and is not looking forward to staying at his grandparents. Chris makes the offer that Greg can stay at the family's Bed-Stuy apartment. Rochelle, Chris's mother, is initially against Greg staying, but gives in. When Greg arrives the first night, there is a banner welcoming him and Rochelle temporarily transforms into June Cleaver.
As Rochelle believes that guests must be given priority, the family's menu is (temporarily) changed to vegetarian and Greg has priority over television watching, with "Nova" substituted for "MacGuyver". However, Chris must bear the brunt of the annoyances as Greg shares a room with him.
Not only does Greg snore -- not only does Greg have a tendency to flail about in bed as he reimagines "Flashdance" in his sleep, but he has a further problem. It seems that as a habit carried over from childhood of fighting off monsters, Greg dresses like superheroes before going to bed to frighten the monsters away. Chris has to wake up Greg one morning -- with Greg dressed in the full regalia of Darth Vader, the mighty Sith Lord.
Yes, I was rolling my eyes. Eccentricity I can take; lunacy is another thing altogether. The "B" plot isn't much better. Chris's father, always on the lookout for another job, takes a part-time job as a taxi driver. While on the prowl for customers, a customer asks Julius to drive him to Las Vegas. Julius says no, of course, until he is offered $1000 to make the trip. Rochelle is fine with this, because hey, it's $1000!
However, the customer is actually a robber, holding up stores along the route with Julius completely unaware that his customer is the "taxi cab bandit" (we get to see this master criminal mentioned on a news cast, with authorities across the country on the alert). Julius obliviously makes it all the way to Las Vegas, where the police finally confront the two. There's some sort of subplot involving the customer's girlfriend, but by that time my attention had wondered completely away. You ever pick up a book and absent-mindedly flip through it when there's a show you've committed to watch? Well, guess what I was doing during this "B" plot.
We have to assume -- for comedic purposes -- that Julius has an IQ of 70. In sitcoms, a few brain-farts can be expected, where intelligent characters make commitments or say something clueless under a temporary mental haze. But the fact that Julius couldn't figure out what was going on beggars belief. Julius is the "strong-man" of the family; for Julius to be reduced to witless dupe is a major comedown.
Furthermore, Greg's massive weirdness would have had Chris's family calling social services. Yes, I know that everyone wants to rewrite "The Man Who Came to Dinner", and yes, we knew that Greg was weird -- but we not only didn't know that he was that weird, we also didn't know that anybody was permitted to be that weird in the "Everybody Loves Chris" universe. The creators of the show have suddenly changed the rules, and these sudden changes of the rules are usually the result of a writer's ineptitude -- "I'm going to change the rules of the universe to shoehorn in this awkwardly-written story."
Your first response might be, "hey, this is just a situation comedy, so have fun". Well, I never expected Fonzie in "Happy Days" to be able to spout wings. I never expected Mary Richards in "Mary Tyler Moore" to transform into a werewolf on moonlit nights. I'm sure you could have gotten a lot of funny episodes that way, but you would have changed the essence of what those comedies were about. There's a reason that "Jumping the Shark" because a catchphrase for the point that a series declines -- "Happy Days" at one time was a sitcom about a kid growing up in the 1950s; after a while it became a star vehicle for the "cool guy" to the point where more and more outrageous things had to be found for him to prove his cool. The shark-jump was the transgression; the show would no longer be what it once was, ever again.
My wife said, "They've finally run out of ideas," when she saw this episode. Yes, sweetheart, they did, at least for this week. I hope that Greg in a Darth Vader mask isn't the shark-jumping moment of "Everybody Hates Chris".
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