‘Everybody Still Hates Chris’ Showrunner Sanjay Shah Gives Us Many Reasons to Love the Animated Reimagining

This week, Comedy Central takes viewers on an animated visit back to the world of Chris Rock’s autobiographical family comedy Everybody Hates Chris. The new show, which is titledEverybody Still Hates Chris, features Rock as the grown-up Chris narrating stories inspired by his own experiences growing up as “a skinny nerd” in a large working-class family in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, during the late 1980s.

The show is co-created and exec produced/show-run by Sanjay Shah, whose many writing credits include Central Park, Dream Productions, Fresh Off the Boat, King of Hill and South Park. We recently had the chance to speak with Shah about his clever new animated sitcom:

Sanjay Shah: I met Chris [Rock] during the pandemic while I was working on a Pixar series [Dream Productions] as a consulting producer. I got the chance to work with Pete Docter and Mike Jones on that show. When the show was wrapping up, my agent reached out and ask me if I wanted to talk to Chris Rock about doing a reboot of Everybody Hates Chris. I am a huge fan of his, but I said no thank you, because I assumed it was going to be a live-action project. But then my agent explained that it was going to be an animated reboot. That’s when I became interested.

So, I met him and came in with a take on the show. He hired me in the room. I had a big joke that helps us get to the transition between live action and animation. We both wanted to essentially do the same show and to use animation to make it fresh and unique. I love the original show and didn’t want to mess with it too much. I felt that animation offered us new opportunities since original shows included fantasies and cutaways and a lot of absurdist elements.

In terms of world building, the show allowed us to see character pairings that we hadn’t seen before. I wanted to see the inner lives of some of the characters we hadn’t explored before, and to be able to break structure in a way they didn’t have time in the original show. They had so many stories to tell, and this was the opportunity for us to explore those. I mean, even from that first sit-down with Chris, he mentioned a couple of things that I thought, man, these are going to be great stories, and we got to pull from those as early as the fourth episode of the series!

When did you actually start working on the series? 

I believe the first pitch happened in 2020. Then we had to wait a year or so for the deals to go through, and then, Chris went on tour.

Who’s handling the animation?

I’m based in Los Angeles, and the animation is produced by Titmouse. I really shopped around when I was deciding which animation studio to go with. I’ve been working on and off in half hour and feature animation for 20 years, so I’ve become kind of a nerd about the process. I was looking for some specific things in terms of the infrastructure that I knew Titmouse could offer. Our secondary animation hub is in in Vancouver, which is in the same time zone. It was important for me for everyone to be in the same time zone. I wanted to be able to hop on a plane and go and visit our unit up there, so that everyone can put a face to the show, keep morale high and have everyone invested.

Collaboration with the production side is very important to me: My first job on King of the Hill, I sat right next to a board artist and we became good friends … It wasn’t until my days at Pixar that I really got to experience what collaboration between writer and artist can look like and how that can really plus what you’re doing. It’s so important have a schedule that gave both the writing side and production side adequate time to do their very best work.

Please tell us a bit about the look of the show and your visual inspirations.

We put a lot of effort into the overall look of the show. Prior to this show, I was co-running Central Park; the philosophy there was to be be absolutely accurate to the real world of Central Park and for the design to evoke a certain feeling, paying really close attention to the shape language and making sure that characters felt funny. Of course, Central Park was a modern-day show, while Everybody Still Hates Chris is period piece that takes place in 1987.

I’m sure you’ve heard people grouse about how the animation world went through a tough time in the 1980s. But that’s when I was growing up and I was in love with the animation of the time, not realizing that it was a step back compared to the Disney days of yore. I loved that era’s style of animation, so from the very beginning I said I wanted to do an elevated ‘80s style, so that it didn’t feel too current — that would just feel like a weird juxtaposition for a show that takes place in 1987. I didn’t want it to look too modern.

Also, I wanted the look of the show to reflect what was happening in Brooklyn in the ’80s: that was the era of artists like Basquiat and Keith Herring. So, we took field trips and did a lot of research: In our pre viz we went from shape language inspired by Basquiat (some of the like face shapes are Basquiat inspired) and Xs in the eyes and the ears are a nod to Herring.

When I was at Pixar, I was working on what eventually became Elemental. While I was there I saw all of the concept art created for the movie Soul, I was really struck by how much they labored for realism, while still were able to make it feel like a Pixar movie. So, in terms of transitioning from live action to animation, I didn’t want the design to be too avant-garde or, for lack of a better word, ‘cartoony’. We wanted something that felt a little bit realistic but still exaggerated, pushed and funny.

Finally, Fat Albert was a big inspiration for the look of the neighborhood backgrounds. If you recall, the buildings in that show were all different wild shapes and everything, but they had these beautiful watercolor backgrounds. I am especially proud of our backgrounds, they have these hand-drawn lines, and are not perfect, but they’re still going to realism.

We have these folders in Google Drive of hundreds of images depicting images from the rea, from block parties to 17-year-old Tupac sitting on a Honda scooter for crowd scenes from Rockaway Beach. We watched music videos and looked at the fashion of the of that time period. You know I really loved that aspect of King of the Hill, where the writers would just spend time in Austin and spend a week just absorbing the culture and stories around Texas. Pixar was very heavy on research as well, so I brought those experiences with me to this show.

Looking back, what was the toughest aspect of bringing this show to animated life?

Honestly, it was surviving the writers’ strike. We sold the show at a time when deals already took so long to get done. Then, Chris left for a worldwide tour, and we had the strike right after that. Even with Chris on board, there was always a question mark because studios were shelfing projects so they could get write-downs. There was all this fear and uncertainty amongst all my friends who were working on various shows, that if we do come back, will we have the budget to hire everyone back.

I felt lucky that I was working with the team that knew the strike was coming. I got my first job at King of the Hill when that early strike happened. I knew what a long strike would look like. So, we wrote as many scripts as we could in the hopes that at least if we come out on the other side of this, there’ll be shows to produce. I feel l very lucky that the network loved the initial scripts and were happy with the voice performances as well. So within two or three days after the strike ended, the entire staff was back in production, and we were able to complete the episodes.

How many episodes are finished now?

We have the first 10 in the can, locked and ready to go for the first season. The initial order was for 20 episodes. We just sent episode 16 out for color, so the second 10 will be done in the next several months. The show airs weekly, but Comedy Central is following the mini-binge model that was very successful for the new Beavis and Butt-Head show. They’re airing two episodes in a row, and we’re sandwiched between Family Guy as our lead in and The Daily Show.

What kind of feedback have your received from Chris Rock himself?

One of the reasons I initially said ‘no’ to the show was because Chris is who inspired me to enter the comedy world. I saw his special Bring the Pain when I was in college and it made me want to pursue standup — which I did, I performed stand-up for several years, and that’s kind of the track I was on and just sort of by happenstance I took this detour into TV writing just kind of to make money, because I was a broke comic. I liked his comedy so much that when I was a writer on Fresh Off the Boat, I wrote an episode called “Bring the Pain” about Chris’s special and what a big impact it made on so many of us when it came out. So, I was worried about working for him, and I didn’t want him to ever be disappointed in me or think that the show would was tarnish his legacy in any way.

I have to say that I’m really happy that he’s been proud of the show. He sits down and watches episodes with me and enjoys it. All of his notes are additive, and he’s been the best collaborator. If this is the last thing I ever do, I’m really glad I’m going out like this!

What do you hope the legacy of the show will be?

I’m just hoping that original fans of the original series like myself feel like we did a good job and that this animated show is handshake with the previous one, that we did right by the legacy of that show. I’ll be really happy if we’re bringing in new fans because I believe it’s so hard to write shows that get supported these days.

It’s important to have shows that have a little bit of edge, but that the entire family can sit down and watch together … When Fresh Off the Boat premiered, I was really moved when somebody posted a picture of four generations of their family sitting down to watch the show together. I think the original Everybody Hates Chris did the same thing.

When I was rewatching it to prepare for that interview with Chris, my son ended up watching all 88 episodes with me, and he loved it, too. I realized then that there aren’t many shows that we watch together like this. That’s what I used to do with my father and my mom, too. It’s funny, but my dad and I were huge Gilmore Girls fans! We watched that show together. My mom and I would watch sitcoms together, but my dad was into late night soaps!

What do you think about the rollercoaster-like ups and downs of the animation scene and the uncertain future faced by so many in 2024?

To me, it’s same as it ever was. This business has always been cyclical. It’s always hard for people to understand what it takes to make an animated show and how there is a lot of variance in what the budget can be, and how a low-budget show (like the early South Park seasons or any Adult Swim show, for example) can be as successful as a very expensive show. There’s a lot of room to be successful in animation. Even during the peak times, there were some wonderful shows at Netflix that had critical acclaim and 100% audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but they’d be canceled after one season. They would spend millions and millions of dollars on several episodes and they would never air it. There has never been a good situation in animation. I think it’s always an uphill battle. Now, with AI and all these other things entering the fray, it’s adding even more complications.

I remember there was a period where it was so hard to find artists because everybody was trying to make animated shows, and we had over 500 shows on streaming platforms. It was hard to keep artists because everyone was poaching each other’s artists. But that to me felt like the anomaly. I don’t ever remember something like that happening in my 20-year career!

Everybody Still Hates Chris premieres on Comedy Central on Wednesday, September 25. You can watch the trailer below, and hear more about the making-of with the recording of the hour-long San Diego Comic-Con panel here.