My Name Is Earl – Season One

Review By: Staff

“Karma, the secret of life coming straight from Carson Daly’s lips to my morphine laced ears.” This quote is the summation of My Name Is Earl, a show that revolves around the doings of a simple uneducated man who has learned the hard way of what bad karma can do to a person. The logline may sound a bit tedious and boring; but the show wisely does not ground itself in any sort of reality. It exists in a sort of comical karma filled world where each action has an equal reaction eventually down the path of life. Leading to an abundance of comedy.

Earl Hickey (Jason Lee, Kissing A Fool, Dogma) has been consistently wronging people since he was a young boy. He has constantly stolen from others, hurt others physically, and certainly hurt others emotionally, all for the sake of stroking his ego. One day Earl peals off a winning lottery ticket that makes him a $100,000 winner. In his excessive celebration he runs out into the middle of the street and is promptly hit by car. The lottery ticket disappears. In his hospital bed Earl is watching T.V. On comes the wise Carson Daly, and Earl hears for the first time the aforementioned quote. Earl realizes that he must change his life. So while in bed he makes a list of all of the people that he has hurt over the years with a plan on making good on all those on his list. The list ranges from small things like smoking in public, to larger things like costing his father an appointment to local office.

While in bed Earl’s wife Joy (Jamie Pressly, Not Another Teen Movie, Torque) arrives with her new man Crab Man (Eddie Steeples, Torque, Akeelah and the Bee) and with divorce papers. Next to his bed his slow thinking, loyal, but purposeless brother Randy (Ethan Suplee, Remember the Titans, Cold Mountain) sleeps. Earl realizes that he must start fixing his karma immediately, for his selfishness has affected his loved ones. He begins, and soon after his lottery ticket returns to him. Now Earl has found his purpose in this life.

The ground that My Name Is Earl is built on is intentionally unsteady. If the show were based in any sort of concrete reality it would certainly loose much of its broad comedy; because so much of the humor is derived from absurd circumstances happening to the main characters. A great example of this is an episode entitled “Y2K”, where Earl is making his gang return one of those red “ticket-pulling thingies” that are in department stores. This leads to a flashback (very common in the Earl universe) that shows how the gang came upon the “ticket-pulling thingie.” During the Y2K phase Crab Man stumbled upon some knowledge that the computers weren’t able to compute the New Year, so they were going to rise up and band together in order to ...