[Televisionary]

I guess it pays to be hated. In a surprise move, the CW will announce later today that it will give an early full season pickup for comedy Everybody Hates Chris . The announcement is expected to come at the CW's portion of the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, currently underway in Pasadena. The early full season pick up of Everybody Hates Chris (a full 22 episodes for the 2007-08 season) is the first so far for the CW. Chris recounts the childhood experiences of Chris Rock (who narrates the single-camera comedy) growing up in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in the 1980s. It was created by Rock and Ali LeRoi and stars Tyler James Williams, Tichina Arnold, Terry Crews, Tequan Richmond, Imani Hakim, and Vincent Martella. The full season pickup for Chris definitely shines a light on the strength of this superlative series, which launched in the fall of 2005 on UPN before moving over to the newly created CW at the start of the season. Meanwhile, I'm hopin...

There are some combinations that are just plain great together, like chocolate and peanut butter, and some that don't sound so appetizing on paper but are just satisfying none the less (like, say, lamb and mint jelly). Of the latter, there's Monday night's odd-couple pairing of Everybody Hates Chris and Old Christine . Before I start getting emails from people "reminding" me that they're not exactly paired together on the same network ( Chris is on the CW, while Christine lives happily on CBS), I'm talking more about the general neighborhood than them actually being next-door neighbors. And now that both have taken up residence on Monday evenings, the similarities between them become all the more apparent. Both of these series couldn't be more different in terms of tone or visual style, but both Everybody Hates Chris and Old Christine have become indicative of a new breed of modern family comedies, comprising a direct reaction to all the Friends ...