Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - EVE

Eve aired from September 2003 until September 2006 on UPN.

Trendy Miami Florida, was the setting for this sitcom about friends and relationships. Shelly ( Eve Jeffers) was the creative force behind DivaStyle , a fashion design business she had started with her friends Janie and Rita ( Natalie Desselle-Reid, Ali Landry). Happily married , Janie was well grounded and the voice of reason ,while Rita a former model, lacked common sense and lived for the moment. After years of dating Shelly was ready to find Mr. Right and settle down. She was dating handsome J.T. ( Jason George), who was somewhat chauvinistic and commitment-phobic , and their relationship had its ups and downs. J.T.'s roommate and best friend ,Nick ( Brian Hooks), was a picky IRS agent looking for the perfect woman. In the spring he thought he had found her in Dani ( Jazmin Lewis), but things didn't work out.The fashionable Z Lounge, where they spent much of their free time, was managed by their English friend , Donovan ( Sean Maguire). Donovan was attracted to Rita but was concerned that if they got involved romantically it would ruin their friendship.

By the start of the second season Shelly and J.T. had broken up but were still having occasional sex while Rita, who had begun dating Donovan, moved in with Janie because she was bankrupt.When she wore out her welcome she convinced J.T. and Nick to let her move in with them. In the spring Shelly was dating 26-year-old Grant ( Sharif Atkins), a younger man, and J.T. realized he really loved her. On her birthday both men proposed to her. Meanwhile Donovan's application for residency was denied and he was reluctantly preparing to return to England.

The 2005-2006 season began with Shelly chosing J.T. over Grant and Donovan living with J.T. and Nick-since he found a job selling Bethany Blue makeup for a British conglomerate he had been able to get a work visa. Shelly and J.T. broke up again, but were determined to remain friends, and he was accepted to Miami State Medical School, where he struggled both financially and academically. The spring saw Rita , who had been dating Donovan again, move out of the guys' place and into her own apartment. In the series finale Janie, Rita and Nick were arrested for dispensing botox without a license at the DivaStyle boutique but since Eve had been canceled , viewers never found out what happened.

A Review of Eve and All of Us from The New York Times

TELEVISION REVIEW; A Rap Diva. A Painful Divorce. Cue the Laugh Track.
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 15, 2003

Agents have to stop telling celebrities that their lives could be a sitcom. The results are all too visible in two new UPN shows best described as agenda sitcoms.

''Eve,'' which has its premiere tonight, is a single-girl comedy wrapped around the marketing ambitions of the show's star and co-executive producer, Eve, a 23-year-old rap diva who is unveiling her clothing line, Fetish, this fall. ''All of Us,'' which has its premiere tomorrow, is a broken-marriage comedy based on the real-life upheavals of its executive producers, the actor Will Smith and his second wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

''Eve'' is the more harmless of the two. This singer, in blond hair and a fringed silver lamé minidress, plays Shelly, a single woman who owns a Miami dress shop with two friends. (Her costumes are by Fetish.) The humor is bawdy and not very different from the jokes on the UPN comedy ''Girlfriends,'' but the cast is well chosen, and Eve, as a leading lady, has an appealingly tough edge that matches the paw-print tattoos on her chest.

''For just one night I want something hot and sexy,'' she tells her colleagues, who are appalled she wore one of their most expensive dresses ($5,000) to a club. ''If it's not going to be a man, it's going to be this dress.''

''All of Us'' is more unusual, a comedy about the pain of a broken marriage. Robert James Sr. (Duane Martin), an entertainment reporter for a Los Angeles television station, is in love with a young, sexy and kind kindergarten teacher, but not yet divorced from the older, less sexy, less kind mother of his son. Some may find the premise refreshing, but it is mostly revisionist: a portrait of the trophy wife as victim.

When Tia, the teacher, worries that Robert's wife will use Bobby Jr. to stop his father from signing the final divorce papers, she seeks consolation from her sassy support group at school. ''This is war,'' one of her colleagues tells a distraught Tia (Elise Neal) in the teachers' lounge. ''You're fighting with rocks and sticks, and she's got the mother of all bombs: the baby bomb.''

UPN is perhaps most blatantly lending itself to its stars' caprices. But it is not alone. ABC has a new show, ''I'm With Her,'' about a ordinary guy married to a superstar, written by the screenwriter Chris Henchy and based on his marriage to Brooke Shields. Like Jada Pinkett Smith, whose alter ego is Tia, Mr. Henchy cast his fictional self as a schoolteacher, a profession that suggests virtue a little more keenly than actress or screenwriter.

''All of Us'' cannot be dismissed as a marketing gimmick for Mr. Smith, whose dazzling success in movies since his early days on the sitcom ''Fresh Prince of Bel-Air'' hardly needs a boost on television.

Instead ''All of Us'' seems to be a personal project: a sympathetic self-portrait that exempts the father -- and his comely fiancée -- from guilt. Not that his first wife is surrendering gracefully. Tall, scary and selfish, Neesee (LisaRaye) is cast as a vixen who left her husband and now wants to ruin his second chance at happiness. She could be fun as a television villainess, but her wickedness is muffled.

Mr. Smith seems reluctant to make the wife too witchy, lest viewers conclude he is trashing his real ex-wife and hurting his children. Perhaps for similar reasons Tia is boringly loving and well-intentioned. There is little tension: 5-year-old Bobby (Khamani Griffin) loves his mother and his future stepmother unconditionally.

It may seem brave to create a sitcom about the reality of broken marriages, but it is foolhardy to use a sitcom to gild a real-life breakup.

EVE

UPN, tonight at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time
Created and written by Meg DeLoatch; Ms. DeLoatch, Robert Greenblatt and David Janollari, executive producers. A production of the Greenblatt Janollari Studio in association with Warner Brothers Television Production.

WITH: Eve (Shelly Williams), Jason George (J. T. Hunter), Ali Landry (Rita Lefleur), Natalie Desselle-Reid (Janie Egins), Brian Hooks (Nick Delaney), Sean Maguire (Donovan Brink), Wendy Mills (Tammy Miller), Peter Gardner (Shaun), Dagney Kerr (Beth) and Brandin Tackley (La La).

ALL OF US

UPN, tomorrow night at 8:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 7:30, Central time
Created by Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and Betsy Borns; Mr. Smith, Ms. Smith, Ms. Borns and James Lassiter, executive producers. Produced by Overbrook Entertainment in association with Warner Brothers Television Production.

WITH: Duane Martin (Robert James Sr.), Elise Neal (Tia Jewel), LisaRaye (Neesee James), Khamani Griffin (Robert James Jr.) and Tony Rock (Dirk Black).

AN Article from The Boston Globe

Black sitcoms may lose home
UPN-WB merger puts shows in jeopardy
By Suzanne C. Ryan, Globe Staff | May 10, 2006

The news will be huge for UPN and WB fans because a number of programs on those networks are not expected to survive after the networks merge to create the CW.

But for viewers like Dorchester resident Louis Eaton, something bigger than just a TV show is at stake.

UPN is the home of eight sitcoms with predominantly African-American casts, more than any other network on television. Overnight, the CW may potentially wipe out that window into the black community, which would be a blow to African-Americans like Eaton, a52-year-old who watches ''Girl-friends" and ''Half & Half."

''I just don't see the black experience reflected much on any other networks," he said.

Although CW officials aren't talking yet about their 2006-07 schedule, it has been widely predicted that Chris Rock's sitcom ''Everybody Hates Chris" and the Tyra Banks reality show ''America's Next Top Model" will survive, along with ''Veronica Mars," ''Smallville," ''Beauty and the Geek," ''Gilmore Girls," and WWE's ''Smackdown."

Seven African-American-focused programs on UPN may be destined for the history books: ''One on One," ''All of Us," ''Cuts," ''Eve," Half & Half," ''Love, Inc.," and ''Girlfriends."

Jannette Dates, dean of the School of Communications at Howard University, called the potential cancellations a ''travesty" because the black middle class already isn't represented much on television, she said.

''Sure, some of those shows were silly sitcom fare, but at least they tried to dive into issues that other shows never touched. 'All of Us' just had a [black] male character confronted with the fact that his son wanted to use the 'n' word. They explored why that was such a moment of tension for everybody."

J. Anthony Brown is a Los Angeles-based comedian who has appeared in a number of sitcoms featuring all-black casts in recent years, including ''Like Family," ''Martin," ''The Hughleys," and ''The Parkers." All of them have been canceled. He called the future ''bleak" for black actors striving to make it on sitcoms.

''Many of these UPN shows have all black actors, black writers, black producers, black camera people. If those shows are canceled, where are those people going to go?" he said.

On TV, ratings -- not race -- are the bottom line, and the reality is that both UPN and the WB, which launched one week apart in 1995, have struggled to create hits.

Last fall, UPN heavily marketed ''Everybody Hates Chris," but the show has averaged about 4.3 million viewers this season. Those are good numbers by UPN standards but not enough to save the network. Likewise, the WB -- which was once a hot spot for teens who watched ''Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and ''Dawson's Creek" -- has averaged 4.7 million viewers for ''Smallville" and 4.6 million viewers for ''Gilmore Girls

CBS Corp., which owns UPN, announced in January that it was joining forces with Warner Bros. Entertainment, which owns the WB, to create the CW. By combining their most popular shows on the same channel and launching new series, they hope to create a stronger network.

If the CW does walk away from African-American-themed programming, it won't be the first network to do so. Both Fox and the WB also embraced those types of shows in the '90s when they were young networks (Fox had ''Martin" and ''In Living Color," the WB had ''The Parent 'Hood" and ''Sister, Sister"). Eventually, they moved on to series with broader appeal.

Beginning in 1996, UPN began filling that niche with shows like ''Moesha" and later ''Malcolm & Eddie." The network's current lineup includes ''Girlfriends," a show about the lives of four professional African-American women; ''Eve," which stars the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist as a fashion designer whose love life needs work; and ''All of Us," which is inspired by the life of actor Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

BET, the cable network dedicated to African-Americans, is a logical place to expect development going forward. Reginald Hudlin, the newly installed head of programming at BET, said he will be ''ecstatic" if UPN abandons its sitcoms.

''If I was still a producer, I would be frustrated," he said. ''Now that I'm a programmer, I say thank you. I will gladly take that audience. They will free up millions of eyeballs to watch BET."

BET, however, has no plans to produce traditional sitcoms in the immediate future. Instead, the network is producing celebrity-based reality shows, talk shows, and some animated programming.

Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, said at least one show -- ''Everybody Hates Chris" -- may benefit from being recast on a higher-profile network.

''I think the CW will bring it a much larger audience," he said. ''If it became a real hit, who knows? It could inspire more shows. Before that happens, though, we're faced with the annihilation of an entire programming type.

''They may not have been the greatest shows ever made," he added. ''But at least they covered different territory than all those interchangeable sitcoms on the big networks."

For Eaton, Monday nights won't be the same without his beloved ''Girlfriends" and ''Half & Half."

''I probably won't watch TV," he said.

For a Website dedicated to Eve go to http://evejeffers.com/

For the Official Site of Ali Landry go to http://www.alilandry.info/

For the Sean Maguire Official Website go to http://www.seanmaguire.co.uk/index.php/cat_id/10/level/1/

For a review of Eve go to http://www.commonsensemedia.org/tv-reviews/Eve.html