Reboots and sequels aren’t just unsurprising in 2024, they’re expected. It doesn’t matter how popular or unknown a show or movie is, chances are it’s coming back. What makes Everybody Hates Chris unique, though, is that it’s coming back not only with a new look, but also in a new medium. “I wouldn’t have pursued this if it was a live-action reboot, it was the animated part that was appealing,” showrunner Sanjay Shah told IndieWire.

A big reason for developing this reboot of the 2005 sitcom Everybody Hates Chris (loosely based on comedian Chris Rock’s childhood) as an animated series was to explore the neighborhood. For Shah, who has worked in both live-action and animated films, this was an opportunity for different character pairings than we’ve seen before, to venture into fantasy sequences and look beyond the main Bed–Stuy neighborhood. For Shah, this possibility was exciting because the original couldn’t really go to other places—he mentioned an episode where the family tries to vacation outside of New York City but gets stuck at a bus stop, but “now we get to see them make that journey.”

From the start, Everybody Hates Chris feels timeless, not only because of its ’80s setting and the absence of phones and the internet, but also because of the look of the neighborhood. The realism of the backgrounds and production design has a painterly quality that is reminiscent of ’80s and even ’90s cartoons like Hey Arnold, which made their settings feel like real places where people live. The animation team at Eye Animation Productions recreated the look of Brooklyn in the ’80s, right down to the street signs and buses. Part of the goal of the animated reboot was to recreate the era in which the series is set. The ’80s were a notorious time for animation, budget cuts and limited animation were common. So for Shah, this was an opportunity to make an elevated ’80s cartoon that evoked the realism of a cartoonish King of the Hill and felt like it was live-action but drawn, while also recalling the original Everybody Hates Chris and his penchant for stretching reality through fantasy, cutaways and exaggerated moments, and expanding the world through animation.

Even simpler things that stretch the realism or practicality of live action (like a child falling into the sewers in the second episode) can only be done comically in animation. (According to Shah, this storyline also originally featured a scene where the same child met radioactive turtles.) But animation not only stretches the imagination to impossible lengths for comic effect, it also allows animators to express things that even live-action actors can’t, like extreme emotion. “Even if it’s just suddenly the background disappearing and a color chart expressing emotion, we can do things in animation that we couldn’t do otherwise.”

Setting “Everybody Still Hates Chris” in 2024 doesn’t mean updating the characters or the story. As Shah tells it, the goal was always to carry on as if these episodes were filmed in the 2000s, with the only major sign that this is a modern production being the voiceover from the adult Chris Rock. Just like in the original version, Rock chimes in from time to time, talking about his young fictional counterpart and commenting on the action. While the stories are about yesterday, Rock’s narration, and thus the show in general, can be about today. “The ’80s were a harbinger of things to come, from economic inequality to the rise of right-wing rhetoric,” Shah explained, so in terms of commentary on the present, showing the ’80s as they were works just as well as if the setting were a contemporary one.

The show also eschews serialized storylines. Binge-watching and streaming have made serialized storylines the norm, but “Everybody Still Hates Chris” enjoys the fact that each episode is its own. “Ultimately, as a viewer, I’m here to see the characters and the family, and we wanted to show more of that,” Shah said. “I think there’s also a desire to be able to jump in at any time without a big barrier to entry where you have to watch the whole season to understand what everyone is talking about today, and that was part of the charm of the original.”

That being said, there is one major serialized element, which is that the animated reboot literally picks up where the original left off, when Chris gets his GED scores and realizes he failed. This prompts his mother to literally slap him so hard that it all becomes an animation. “That took a lot of thinking and talking with Chris, but we realized there was still some scope to tell stories if we included events from his real life,” Shah said. Part of the goal of bringing these characters back was to use a “floating timeline” like on “The Simpsons,” where it feels like time is passing and the characters are going through changes, but they’re still stuck where they started. “I wanted to capture Chris in that time when he’s still a black Charlie Brown before his road to fame begins,” Shah added. “That’s what we wanted to achieve here.”

“Everybody Still Hates Chris” premieres on Comedy Central on September 25.