"You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every time somethin' good happened to me, somethin' bad was always waitin' around the corner. Karma. That's when I realized I had to change. So I made a list of everything bad I've ever done and, one by one, I'm gonna make up for all my mistakes. I'm just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl." - Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) in the "My Name is Earl" opening credits
My Name is Earl: Season One DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Karma is a funny thing. For years, NBC dominated Thursday nights with various incarnations of its "Must-See" lineup, including such classics as The Cosby Show, Friends, Seinfeld, Cheers, and Mad About You. As the runs of each of these series came to an end, however, the network seemed to squander the opportunity to find the next big sitcom. Instead, it programmed what can most generously be described as filler. (Remember Union Square, Stark Raving Mad, Cursed, and Inside Schwartz? Didn't think so.) The network itself seemed both stark raving mad and cursed. But thanks to the migration of two terrific sitcoms - My Name is Earl and The Office - to Thursday nights in the 2005-2006 season, the network seems to have finally gotten some of its Thursday night mojo back.
My Name is Earl: Season One recently arrived on DVD, just in time for the network premiere of season two. Jason Lee (Almost Famous) stars as Earl Hickey, a petty thief, scam artist, and all around ne'er-do-well. One day while buying "a pack of smokes, a couple Lotto scratchers, and a tallboy at 10:00 in the mornin'" from a local convenience store, he is overjoyed to discover that he is the lucky winner of $100,000.00. So overjoyed, in fact, that he bounds into the street for a celebratory dance and is promptly hit by a car. As he loses consciousness, he sees his "lucky" lotto ticket get swept away in a gust of wind.
Recovering in a hospital, Earl reflects on his sucky life. He married his wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) after their booze-soaked first date. He was too drunk to realize that she was six months pregnant at the time. They named the kid Dodge because she remembers that his daddy drove a truck. A few months later, Joy was pregnant again. Earl Jr. had a decidedly darker complexion than Earl Sr. - he also had a bushy afro that looked suspiciously like that of Darnell (Eddie Steeples), a waiter at the Crab Shack - but Earl loves the kid anyway. Earl is also saddled with a sweet but dumb younger brother, Randy (Ethan Suplee). When Joy brings him divorce papers while he's lying in the hospital bed, Earl tries to decide how to get his life back in order. He gets his answer from an unusual source: while channel surfing, he stumbles across Carson Daly discussing the idea of karma - what goes around comes around.
Earl decides that he must have lost his Lotto ticket because of this karma thing, so he sets out to correct all of the wrongs he committed over the years. He makes up a list ranging from littering to faking his death to break up with a girl. He even stole a car from a one-legged woman! He and Randy move into a crummy motel where they befriend housekeeper Catalina (Nadine Velazquez) and get to work crossing things off of his list. When his winning lottery ticket literally comes flying back into his life, Earl realizes that he has finally found his purpose.
My Name is Earl successfully combines several styles of humor - including slapstick and satire - that will appeal to viewers on many different levels. When Earl expresses dismay that the word "jackass" appears in a newspaper headline ("Jackass Tries to Rob Liquor Store with a Crossbow"), Joy replies, "World's changing, Earl. You'd be surprised what those asswipes in the media get away with. There's a picture of the stupid douche bag on the bottom. Shot himself in the arm." This is an excruciatingly funny commentary on both our society and the characters themselves.
This exchange takes place in one of the season's funniest episodes, "Monkeys in Space." The douche bag in question is one of Earl's old pals, Hank Lange (Carnivale's Tim DeKay). Since Earl once ruined his birthday party, he decides to make up for it by giving Hank one more special day before he gets transferred to state prison. Hank's three requests sound easy enough - he wants to read his hometown paper, have donuts from his favorite donut shop, and have a visit with his grandmother - but thanks to the prison's extremely limited visiting hours and several other complications, Earl realizes that crossing Hank off of his list will be harder than he first thought. Hank's Uncle Charlie (E.J. Callahan) gets the newspaper in the mail everyday, but the cantankerous coot is confined to a wheelchair, lives on the top floor of an apartment complex, is afraid to use the elevator (see the bit about the wheelchair), and refuses to let Earl check the mail. Earl is forced to lug the man up and down the stairs in his wheelchair just to get the paper. The one-legged woman Earl stole a car from turns out to run the donut shop. Grandma's extremely dry eyes need to be lubricated every ten minutes or her eyelids will stick to her eyeballs, but she hates the drops. All of the tasks take so long that Earl never seems to be able to make it to the prison before visiting hours are over, even when he wakes up an hour earlier every day. This episode plays like a clever variation on Groundhog's Day, and each scene is funnier than the last. (Those involving Grandma's eye-drops belong in the comedy hall of fame).
The series is so successful because it manages to mix wild humor with affectingly heartfelt moments. A major subplot in "Monkeys in Space," for example, centers on Randy trying to find a purpose of his own. Another funny yet ultimately moving episode is "Dad's Car." It's Mother's Day, and Randy and Earl try to give their mother the best one ever. Unfortunately, what she really wants is for Earl to make up with his father, Carl (Beau Bridges). Carl gave up on Earl a long time ago, so this might prove to be an impossible task. Earl decides that his best bet is to retrieve his father's car. Earl lost it in a drag race years ago, but told his father that he accidentally drove it into a lake. Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood) guest stars as the bully who won the car years ago. Earl challenges him to another race, which leads to an amusing showdown involving foot sucking, a "snakedog," and the perils of smoking. The emotional payoff, however, occurs when Earl discovers that it wasn't his dad's car - the car was meant to be a gift for him. They were going to refurbish it together as a father/son project, but then Earl "drove it into a lake." Earl and Carl finally reach a détente when they use the parts that Carl bought years ago to get the car running again.
Earl's relationship with Joy and her family is the focus of "White Lie Christmas," an episode guest-starring Brett Butler (Grace Under Fire) as Joy's mom. Earl always seemed to ruin Christmas for Joy when they were married. (His gifts to her throughout the years include flavored condoms, batteries, and her car keys.) With Randy's help, he tries to win her a car in a radio contest. Things go awry when Joy's parents show up in their RV to celebrate the holiday. It seems that Joy never quite got around to telling her parents that she divorced Earl and married a black man out of fear that her racist father might not leave her the family business, Darville Waterbeds. Earl reluctantly agrees to play along with Joy's secret so that he doesn't ruin this Christmas, too. It soon becomes apparent that everyone in the family has a dirty little secret or two. Can they put everything aside and have a happy holiday?
The season ends with "Number One," the very first item on Earl's list. Crossing number one off of his list ends up costing Earl all of his lottery winnings. When he and Randy are left broke and homeless, he begins to wonder when his good karma will return. This funny episode explores what really happened on the day Earl won his prize, making it a terrific bookend for the season.
One reason the series is so successful is because of the great performances given by the cast. Lee perfectly captures both halves of Earl's personality - the conniving schemer and the charming do-gooder. Suplee is eerily convincing as mouth-breathing dolt Randy. Pressly is downright brilliant as Joy. She lights up every scene she's in. Steeples and Velazquez don't always have a lot to do, but both manage to draw big laughs.
The first season also features a relative rogue's gallery of guest stars, including country singer Trace Adkins, Kathryn Joosten (Desperate Housewives), Silas Weir Mitchell (Prison Break), Dax Shepard (Punk'd), Giovanni Ribisi (Friends), Timothy Stack (Son of the Beach), Johnny Galecki (Roseanne), Harland Williams (Gary and Mike), Jon Favreau (Dinner for Five), Booth Colman (Planet of the Apes), Adam Goldberg (Relativity), Christine Taylor (The Brady Bunch Movie), Malcolm David Kelley (Lost), Juliette Lewis, Don Swayze, Clint Howard (Gentle Ben), and Geoffrey Lewis (Salem's Lot).
The twenty-four episodes that make up the first season are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in two thin, clear keepcases, both of which hold a pair of discs. The front of the first case features a photo of Earl while Randy takes the spotlight on the second case. The back of each case features a listing of episode titles, airdates, and brief synopses. The cases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve.
The main DVD menus employ a scratch-off lottery ticket theme. From this menu, viewers can play all of the episodes, go to the individual episodes menu, choose language options or view the special features menu. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are no scene selection menus.
