"My Name is Earl" has some unlikely ancestors. It belongs to a genre of television comedy/drama best described as "Good works shows". Popular in the eighties, when "Highway to Heaven" and "Quantum Leap" topped the charts, these shows concerned a normal, everyday guy or gal who, usually at the inspiration of some amorphous Higher Power, travelled from place to place attempting to make things Right. These shows drew their audiences in with their optimism, their conviction and their reminder that, however bad the world may seem, we have it in us all to make it better. Naturally, once the 90s dawned, they withered on the vine.
So now we're in the 2000s. How do you draw an audience jaded by the horrors around them back to the form? By taking the its conventions and completely subverting them. Instead of your average whitebread middle class straight edge, ala Scott Bacula or Patrick Duffy, you have Earl, a scuzzy, scummy lowlife with the kind of handlebar mustache that always makes one think of dead wives in the cellar. One day, realising that his life sucks, he decides to go on a quest to right all the wrongs he committed in his life. This is, as you might imagine, a fairly daunting prospect. Instead of God or some other vaguely Judeo-Christian concept, you have what Earl calls "karma", though it has little to do with karma as Hindus or Buddhists would understand it. It's more like the stalking Death in "Final Destination", only armed with a custard pie and a hand-buzzer instead of a chainsaw. If Earl does something good, he, and usually hordes of other people through a complex Rube-Goldberg unravelling of events, is rewarded. If he does bad, karma ensures Earl has a suitably slapstick comeuppance. Initially it seems to only idly look in his direction. But once Earl takes up his quest, the gloves come off. He is, as he puts it, "karma's bitch." At one point, having decided to neglect his duties in favour of romance, he finds himself at karma's mercy, crashing through a seemingly endless series of pratfalls before falling victim to a swarm of bees.
What makes this show work is that, while it never loses its moral compass, it isn't preachy or condescending. The characters inhabit the world we know, not some idealised, processed version of it. Not everyone, even white knight Earl, is necessarily likable. Earl doesn't get all virtuous about his job; he does it because he thinks it's the right thing to do, even if it means helping his repugnant "family"- his loathsome ex-wife Joy (brilliantly played by Jaime Pressely), her layabout boyfriend and their two kids. Even Randy, Earl's endearingly dim brother, who acts as the Laurel to Earl's Hardy, ("I'm gonna ask the judge to smash this walnut with his judge hammer. I bet it explodes like a death star") is given to moments of selfishness.
The scripts are wonderfully creative and have a knack for undermining expectations. In one instance, decides to apologise to the mustachioed girl he made fun of in junior high who he hasn't seen in years. When she opens her front door, cliché demands she be heart-stoppingly beautiful. Instead she has a full beard. "I tried waxing," she says. That's what works. The characters are human. This show doesn't give us people to look up to; it gives us people we could actually be.
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