Everybody Hates Chris, and everybody is talking about it these days. Why? Because the show, created by Chris Rock and Ali Leroi, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this month!
Premiering in September 2005 on UPN (after FOX passed on it), the critically acclaimed and Emmy-nominated TV series followed the dysfunctional real-life shenanigans of Rock’s teenage life.
Recently, social media personality Jay Versace tweeted a clip of the series’ original theme song featuring Tichina Arnold (who portrayed Chris’ mama, Rochelle) on the mic. Naturally, the clip quickly went viral, especially for Black Twitter, the bulk of whom didn’t realize it existed or didn’t know who sang it.
For a bit of history, while most of us are familiar with the instrumental theme song during the opening credits, avid fans of the show may remember that there were themed vocals used as a transition for commercial breaks and the closing credits.
Here are some fun facts from the show’s Fandom site:
•Tichina Arnold composed a theme song for the show and recorded it with 2 of her friends. However, Ali LeRoi and Chris Rock already had some themes in mind, so they kept the ending of it to put in at the end of episodes and before commercial breaks.
•In the original unaired version of the pilot episode, the opening theme song is “The 900 Number” by The 45 King from 1987.
Tyler James Williams, who portrayed the titular character, tweeted a thread of fun trivia facts as well as answers to frequently asked questions to celebrate the anniversary.
Naturally, he did address questions about a possible reboot of the series since a TV show can’t even go a few odd years without a revival being on the table these days:
“It’s been a convo before but the interesting hiccup & blessing is that everyone in this photo [referring to the show title card] is very busy. All work regularly, in a variety of different mediums, genres, networks [etc]. We’ll keep trying but I’m proud of our scheduling issue,” Williams tweeted.
Along with Arnold and Williams, Everybody Hates Chris starred Terry Crews, Tequan Richmond, Imani Hakim, Vincent Martella and Travis T. Flory.
To honor the 15th anniversary and the theme song clip surfacing on the internet, The Root reached out to Tichina Arnold’s team for comment. We are awaiting a response.