Everybody Still Hates Chris - Season 1 Apr 2026

The creative team made the brilliant decision to keep Crews and Arnold on board as the voices of Julius and Rochelle. Hearing their voices come out of animated characters is an immediate emotional shortcut back to the original series. Crews, in particular, thrives in voice acting, his larger-than-life personality perfectly suited to Julius’s hyperbolic frugality.

So, when Paramount+ and CBS Studios announced Everybody Still Hates Chris , a reimagined, animated sequel series, the collective eyebrow of the internet raised. Did we need this? Could a cartoon capture the specific, grounded magic of the original live-action show?

closes the season on a high note. The dance sequence is animated like a cross between Saturday Night Fever and a horror movie. Chris, determined to ask Tasha (voiced by Keke Palmer), must first survive a montage of Greg’s terrible dance lessons. The final scene, where Chris is left standing alone as the disco ball lights swirl around him, is both hilarious and heartbreaking—the perfect distillation of the show’s tone. What the Animation Adds (and What It Loses) The shift to animation is largely a victory. It solves the original show’s biggest limitation: budget. In 2005, a scene of Chris imagining himself as a Jedi was a quick, low-fi gag. In 2024, that same joke becomes a fully animated Star Wars homage with lightsabers, TIE fighters, and a Darth Vader voiced by Laurence Fishburne (a hilarious guest spot). Everybody Still Hates Chris - Season 1

The answer is: you don’t. You evolve.

is a standout. The animation shines as Chris navigates a new, slightly more integrated school. The hallways are drawn as a chaotic jungle, with lockers as territorial watering holes. When Caruso shoves Chris into a trash can, the show does a slow-motion, dramatic recreation of a war movie death scene, complete with sad violin music and Chris’s voiceover: “Every time I died in school, I got resurrected just in time for third period.” The creative team made the brilliant decision to

is a Julius-centric masterpiece. When the family fridge dies, Julius declares it a “luxury appliance” and tries to build a cooling system using a window AC unit, duct tape, and a styrofoam cooler. The animation stretches into absurdist territory, showing Julius’s plan as a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster. It culminates in the kitchen flooding with soapy water, while Rochelle stands silently with her arms crossed—a pose that Tichina Arnold’s animation team has rendered with terrifying, divine precision.

For fans of the original, the show is a warm, familiar hug—with a few sharp elbow jabs to the ribs for good measure. The returning voices of Crews and Arnold act as an anchor, while Chris Rock’s narration is as brilliant as ever. For newcomers, the show is a perfect entry point: a self-contained, animated comedy about the universal hell of being 13, no matter the decade. So, when Paramount+ and CBS Studios announced Everybody

What does it lose? A little bit of the raw, human pathos. Live-action allowed you to see the real tears in Tyler James Williams’s eyes. Animation, even when expressive, creates a layer of abstraction. A cartoon character getting humiliated is funny; a real kid getting humiliated is sometimes painful. The original walked that line perfectly. The new show leans slightly more toward the “funny” side, which makes it a more consistent comedy but slightly less emotionally devastating. One of the smartest decisions in Everybody Still Hates Chris is how it handles race and class. The original show was unflinching in its depiction of microaggressions and systemic poverty. The new show doesn’t soften those edges; it just finds new ways to present them.

The show also leans into the era’s aesthetic. The clothes are louder, the hair is bigger, and the graffiti on the subway cars moves. The animators play with aspect ratios, color grading, and texture to differentiate between Chris’s grim reality (washed-out browns and grays) and his fantasy sequences (hyper-saturated neon).

An episode about a racist shop teacher who assumes Chris stole a calculator is handled with brutal, satirical efficiency. Adult Chris’s narration cuts in: “In the 80s, if you were a Black kid in a mostly white space, you didn’t have to steal anything to get in trouble. You just had to exist.” The scene then cuts to a surreal courtroom where the prosecution is a jury of calculators. It’s absurd, but the point lands.

Does everybody still hate Chris? Yes. Absolutely. But after this spectacular first season, audiences are going to love watching him suffer.