Earl won $100,000 with a scratch-off lottery ticket but was hit by a car before he could collect. Lying in a hospital bed and encased in a body cast, Earl hears a TV host talking about the idea that if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you. Earl's been a petty criminal for years and bad things have happened to him and so the idea makes sense. He's never heard of karma. He thinks the TV host created the concept. Earl says approvingly, "That Carson Daly is a genius."
[If that line, or any of the others quoted here, doesn't sound funny, it's because this writing doesn't capture the actors' perfect timing and delivery.]
Earl (played with easygoing charm by Jason Lee) makes a list of all the bad things he's done and pledges to make it up to everyone he wronged. When the $100,000 lottery ticket he had lost in the crash miraculously makes its way back to him, Earl takes it as a sign that karma approves. With the help of his brother Randy (Ethan Suplee), who is wise in a seemingly slow-witted way, Earl sets out to set things right.
Lee, who played the cartoonist partner to Ben Affleck's character in
Chasing Amy (1997), narrates each episode in voice-over that is as masterful as Ron Howard's in the unfortunately cancelled
Arrested Development. He and Suplee have an affectionate/bickering chemistry that makes them believable as brothers and memorable as comic headliners. Randy describes the county fair as "Disneyland for poor people." When he sees a chess board he exclaims, "Cool! It's one of them checker sets for smart people and gays."
In one of the 24 top-notch episodes in Season One, Earl and Randy try to get their father elected mayor to make up for a race they cost him. Randy: "If Dad was mayor, we'd get to wear top hats and sashes and judge beauty pageants." Earl: "No, Randy, that's Monopoly."
The creator of
My Name is Earl (Thursday nights at 8 on NBC), writer/director Gregory Thomas Garcia, has a sharp eye and keen ear for what is funny. He fills each episode with verbal and physical humor that he blends with expert pacing. There is something in every episode to make almost anyone laugh at least once, and enough to make most viewers laugh heartily and often.
In one episode, Earl tries to win back his father's 1965 Ford Mustang, which he lost in a drag race because he was only about 11 years old and didn't know how to shift into second gear. When he returns the long-lost car to his father, played with deft understatement by guest star Beau Bridges, Earl thinks he can cross off his list the entry that reads, "Lost Dad's car." Instead, Dad, who had intended to give the car to Earl when he became old enough to drive, writes a new entry: "Lost my own car because I am an idiot."
In another episode, Earl and Randy go back to the camp for wayward boys in which they'd spent some time in their mischievous younger years. The camp's slogan was "Touching Bad Boys Since 1936." Its administrators felt they had to change it. "Forcing Boys To Turn Around Since 1936" didn't sound right either. After several more tries, it became, "We Don't Do Anything Inappropriate to the Boys Since 1936."
To bring to life his richly imagined humor, Garcia has assembled a peerless cast. As Joy, Earl's ex-wife, Jaime Pressly supports Lee and Suplee delightfully. Joy is a scheming piece of trailer trash. When someone speaks to her in Spanish, she says dismissively, "I don't speak maid." Pressly, miraculously, makes Joy likeable. In one episode she is thrilled when her new husband takes their sons away for a week because that means she can drink non-stop. But long before the week is over, she feels empty until the boys come back to play "fort" in the living room.
Joy is self-centered and white. Her new husband, played with affecting amiability by Eddie Steeples, is decent and black. She tells him, "When they come from the government about our 40 acres and a mule, let me do the talking."
Earl and Randy sometimes get help in their quest for better karma from Catalina, the woman who cleans the motel room in which they live. She is lithe and good looking and Randy has an unspoken crush on her. But Catalina (Nadine Velazquez) is not just a decorative pretty little thing. She can be steely, as she suggests when she mentions that her mother is dead. Another character says, "Oh, I'm sorry." Catalina: "It's okay. It was either her or me."
Also in Season One:
Earl and Randy try to sneak their car out of an impound lot and inadvertently play matchmaker for their new gay friend;
Earl tries to pay his overdue taxes, which leads to his being trapped with Randy in an abandoned water tower;
Randy, in his 30s, goes back to high school to score a touchdown to make up for the one he missed on purpose when he was in high school the first time so that he and Earl could win a bet they'd placed against Randy's team;
and Joy, whose mom is still alive, competes in a "little miss" pageant with an urn full of cigarette ashes she passes off as her cremated mother.
THE EPISODE ABOUT 2000
Computers took over the world and used human beings for fuel.
That doesn't appear to have happened to us when computers made the switch from Dec. 31, 1999 to Jan. 1, 2000. In our world, the transition was smooth and without the global problems that many people feared might explode if digital networks crashed when confronted with a date they were not programmed to recognize.
But the computers-in-command scenario seemed to have unfolded for Earl, Randy, Joy and a friend of theirs in a riotously funny episode of
My Name is Earl that flashes back to the end of 1999. The four are having their traditional New Year's party in the basement when they hear fireworks, which they think is gunfire. They'd never heard the noisy celebration before because in previous years they'd always been passed out before midnight.
The next morning, the four venture out into a world that seems deserted. There are no people around and so they assume they are the sole survivors of a computer takeover. They don't know that everyone else is greeting the new year at a parade and picnic because in previous years they'd always been hung over.
As the last people on Earth, they feel free to loot the local department store. Each claims his or her own turf and things work out well. At least at first. But when the guy who controls the electronics department gets hungry, he gets no aid from Earl, who commands the food aisle. When Earl eats too many Oreos, his wife won't let him ease his discomfort with any of the medicines in her health and beauty department.
They work things out and peace falls on their post-apocalyptic kingdom, at least it does until they are surprised to learn they are not the last people on Earth. As they walk out of the department store, Catalina, whom they have not met yet, walks in. She has just smuggled herself into the country from Mexico in a crate.
Catalina is not accustomed to American consumerism. She mistakes the sprawling store for something else and says, "Your churches are so beautiful."
_____
*
The Office deservedly won this year's Emmy for Best Comedy, but
My Name is Earl should have been a close second-place contender.
_____
THE WRITE-OFF
Bryan Carey, one of Epinions' most sage and generous reviewers, has shared his insightful guidance in more than 2,000 reviews. To celebrate the milestone, he invited other reviewers to write about topics that relate to the year 2000. He provides links to the entries on
his profile page.
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