Customer Reviews

My Name Is Earl Season 1

5 star:		(72)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

And they say that creative, bizarre shows don't make it on TV anymore...Meet Earl(Jason Lee). Earl is a petty criminal who one day won $100,000 on a scratch-off ticket. Celebrating his unexpected win, Earl is hit by a car, loses the ticket, and ends up in the hospital where he decides that he needs to balance out all the bad things he has done in his life. Finding the ticket and getting his money, Earl is convinced that karma has put him on this mission, much to the dismay of his brother Randy (Ethan Suplee), his ex-wife Joy(Jaime Pressley), and her new boyfriend Darnell the Crab Man(Eddie Steeples).

Since the airing of the pilot, both critics and audiences have been blown away by My Name is Earl. Besides a extremely talented cast whose comedic chops are perfectly timed, Earl has a solid cast of writers who create 22-minutes of laugh out loud comedy every week. Earl's guest stars in Season 1 rival only Scrubs, including Giovanni Ribisi, Johnny Galecki, Beau Bridges, Jon Favreau, Adam Goldberg, Christine Taylor, and Juliette Lewis.

Season 1 of My Name is Earl offered 24 solid episodes, including the pilot, and received the Director's Guild Award and the People's Choice Award for Best New Comedy, and was nominated for a half dozen other awards including 2 Golden Globes. This would be a 5-star show but it remains to be seen if the writers and producers can keep this level of energy up for several more seasons. As First Seasons go though, this is one of the best to come along since Scrubs.

The DVD set just released and it is jam packed with extras include 8 episode commentaries, a 15-minute mini-episode that incorporates the Family Guy into the show, deleted scenes from 6 episodes, some outtake reels that highlight the improvisational nature of Jason Lee, Jamie Pressly, and Ethan Supplee, and a Behind The Scenes look at the show. This is a solid and fun show, and it deserves a place in your collection. Highly Recommended.

A.G. Corwin

St.Louis, MO

If you've read the last 14 reviews, you already know the premise and story of the show. Here's what you won't read from anyone else: Under this show's veneer of blue collar humor lies a deeply spiritual and optimistic journey. The show is comedy in the classical sense--characters in a low place are raised up in the end by a series of events--but it is mainly about repentence, restitution and redemption. Earl decides to change his life for the better and stops doing the bad things he did before (repentence), he goes about seeking forgiveness from the people he has wronged and tries to restore what he has taken from them (restitution) and in the end he and the wronged people are better off for it (redemption). I believe the writers chose well in using the concept of instant karma as the vehicle--the driving force Earl has faith in--because that is a universal concept that all religions can identify and respect. Also, I love how intelligently subtle the change in Earl is portrayed. In every episode you will see a flashback of the "before" Earl along with "new" Earl; notice that there is no difference in clothing or hairstyle from before and after. The change is in his heart and behavior only, where it matters. TV writers usually smack you over the head with visual cues.

Anyone who has strived for spiritual improvement can readily identify with Earl. There are some aspects of that path that are easy and immediately rewarding, but that's not always true. Sometimes you have to suffer the misunderstanding, mocking or rejection of your friends and/or relatives or difficult, unforgiving souls. Later epsiodes have their difficult moments and Earl has to hold tight to his faith to get through it. The most significant of such situations is in the episode "Number One", when Earl gives all his money to the man who was supposed to win it. He ends up losing everything except his faith, hungry and homeless, but is finally restored. Lynard Skynard's "Simple Man" was the perfect music for that scene.

I am very happy to see this show put on DVD because NBC edited bits and pieces out when they reran the episodes to make more time for commercials. Some of those bits are important to comedic timing and storyline flow. I highly recommend you get this collection and try to view the episodes through its spiritual prism.

I didn't watch this show until I found it on DVD, but I was hooked from the first episode. I watched all episodes from Season 1 in a few day; this is a pretty good show. The show has a pretty clever concept--a small time crook named Earl (Jason Lee) is almost killed after he wins $100,000 from an instant lottery ticket. He believes that Karma is punishing him for all the bad things he's done. Therefore, he makes a list of all the people he has wronged in his life and tries to make it up to them one-by-one (or one episode at a time).

The show has great writing and a very good ensemble cast--highlighted by Jaime Pressly's dead-on performance as Earl's ex-wife. What makes the show really great is that it doesn't make fun of it characters. My Name is Earl could get many easy jokes out of the subject matter--lower class, uneducated rural folk--but instead it develops the characters. And the actors play it straight--they never wink at the camera; therefore, they form well-founded characters and not just chariactures.

The show features several recognizable faces in cameos including Dax Shepard, Giovanni Ribisi (hilarious in 2 episodes), Missi Pyle, Timothy Stack, Johnny Galecki, Beau Bridges, Jon Favreau, Adam Goldberg, Samm Levine, Christine Taylor, Malcolm David Kelley, Juliette Lewis, Clint Howard, Mike O'Malley, Max Perlich, and Lin Shaye. The DVD also includes delete scenes, which are better than the deleted scenes you usually find on a DVD.

You've seen a number of reviews here that describe the premise, so let's get right down to the points that make the show good.

No saccharine. Yes, there is affection and there are some deeply touching moments. But at their core, all are sincere. The expression may sometimes be quirky or over the top, but the cast and writers do a helluva job in achieving without ever devolving into farce or parody.

Slowly but surely, we're seeing the characters grow. Earl started his quest for redemption for the most self-centered of motives, but is discovering that kindness and generousness, even when painful, are often rewarding in and of themselves. And a bit of Earls changes are starting to rub off on Randy, Joy, and Crab Man. Someone mentioned that the premise could be limiting. He's right, and he's wrong. As Earl grows more sophisticated in his understanding of the world, I expect he'll realize and try to right ever more complex wrongs.

In it's own wierd way, this is an intelligent show. Not that the characters are particularly intelligent, but the situations are. It occasionally asks some hard questions, and rarely cops out on the difficult answers. Earl doesn't always get it, but the viewer will.

Most important, it's just damned funny. There's at least one laugh-out-loud moment in every show, and usually more. Better yet, they manage this without ever using a laugh track. Laugh tracks always feel to me like the producers are saying "This is a joke, stupid, laugh." The folks who produce Earl deliver laughs, and they trust you to get the joke.

Along with EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, Jason Lee's MY NAME IS EARL emerged as the finest new comedy of this past season. The premise was simple: a perpetual and hapless petty criminal wins the lottery but while celebrating gets hit by a car, causing him to lose the lottery ticket. While in the hospital he sees Carson Daly on TV talking about his philosophy of life, which he describes as karma, i.e. what goes around comes around. Earl comes to the sudden realization that the reason his life sucks is that he has spent his life doing nothing but sucky things to others. He resolves to make up for every bad thing he has ever done by compiling a list of everything he has ever done to hurt someone else and then making amends in each instance. When he finds the lost lottery ticket upon his discharge, he sees this as a sign that he is supposed to use that money to finance his quest. As he puts it each week, "I'm just trying to be a better person."

I have to confess that I often found Jason Lee irritating in most of his movie roles, especially his Kevin Smith films, though he was very fine in ALMOST FAMOUS as the lead singer for the band. Here he essentially recreates Nicholas Cage's character H.I. McDunnough from RAISING ARIZONA. They not only engage in the same kinds of petty thievery, they even resemble one another, and Lee affects the same kind of dumb, lopsided deer-in-the-headlights look of stupefaction that Cage perfected in that great film. But this isn't just mere imitation; Lee really makes the role his own and manages to imbue his utterly stupid character with a kind of genuine goodhearted nobility. For the show to work at all, Lee has to excel as Earl Hickey, and excel he does. Lee's Earl is clearly the central character and he does a great job of carrying the show, but he is assisted by an able though relatively small supporting cast. As good as Lee is as Earl, Jaime Pressly steals just about every episode as Earl's vile ex-wife Joy. An amazing beauty and real life former beauty queen, Pressly manages to come across as pure white trash (look, I'm the scion of several generations of white trash, so I know whereof I talk--you know the folks Jeff Foxworthy always jokes about? Well, those are my people.), albeit trash trapped in a stunning body. Her character could have been insufferable had they kept her the same ruthless plotter that she was in the earliest episodes, but as the season goes along they give her more and more depth, so that you come to learn that a lot of her harsh exterior covers genuine vulnerabilities. Ethan Suplee, another Kevin Smith alumni, plays Earl's brother Randy, one of the world's true innocents. Though Earl is not the sharpest tack in the box, he is Einstein compared to his brother Randy, but while Earl is truly trying to be a better person, Randy has always been one, even when he was assisting Earl in petty thievery. His problem is that he simply doesn't know any better. He is a very dim person with an extremely good heart. Much the same can be said for Joy's husband Darnell, whom Earl inexplicably calls Crab Man. Darnell is played by Eddie Steeples, who became a familiar face immediately before the show hit the air playing an office clerk in love with his rubber band ball in a series of Office Max commercials (he graced the cover of the 2005 Office Max catalog). Earl and Randy live in a seedy motor inn, where they have befriended the Mexican maid Catalina, played by the gorgeous Nadine Velazquez. So far her character has disappointed me. I'm not disappointed with the actress, but with the writers for not finding a better way of integrating her into the show. Few shows success by keeping the focus on just the main three or four characters and I suspect that for the show to develop--and it definitely will need to develop to stay a top show--they will need to do more with Catalina in the future. The cast is rounded out by a few performers who have made repeated guest appearances, including Giovanni Ribisi as a fellow crook, Beau Bridges as Earl and Randy's dad, Tracy Ashton as a one-legged girl Earl wronged (and who he has a huge amount of trouble trying to make amends), and Max Perlich.

I really enjoyed Season One, but I have some worries about where the show goes in the future. Each episode is structured around Earl getting to take one thing off the list each week. While this provides an easy framework to introduce each week's story, it could easily become a limiting premise. To succeed in the long run they are going to have to transcend this premise to become much more than a show about crossing someone else off Earl's list each week. Towards the end of the season they started showing signs that they were going to start breaking out of this framework to some degree. My other fear for the show is that while the characters are all a lot of fun, they might all be a tad too inherently two-dimensional to carry a series over several seasons. In other words, I fear that the show while a lot of fun in the short run might get old quick. They are going to have to give the characters a lot more depth in the future, which might be hard given how fundamentally dumb all the main characters are, excepting only Catalina, who has been underutilized so far. Thanks to shows like ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and SCRUBS and THE OFFICE, the bar has been raised for comedies on TV. Fifteen years ago the show would have been able to just go on as it is, but shows like those just mentioned challenge shows to develop and expand. My gut tells me that the show will be up to the challenge.

But fears for the future aside, this was in its first season a truly funny show with a genuinely unique set of characters. I'm definitely looking forward to see what they are able to do with the show in its second season.

It is doubtful that very many people in this world have been influenced by the words of Carson Daly. However, there is at least one person, and his name is Earl Hickey.

Each fall I find myself conflicted about new shows for a variety of reasons. Should I get attached if it is going to get cancelled? Do I have time for another television show? Or do I like the idea of this show? So I limit myself to only two new shows each season. In the fall of 2005, one of those shows was My Name is Earl. The buzz surrounding this show was amazing and I felt that if I didn't watch, I was going to be missing out on something.

And I was right. Earl is one of those shows that helps me to believe in the good in people, if only for 22 minutes at a time.

Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) is one of those guys who you might call sketchy. With his ragged clothes and big moustache, he may be the typical ideal of a redneck. He has lived his life without much regard for others and never really thought about it that much. That is, until he bought a 100,000 dollar scratch ticket. Celebrating the win, he is hit by a car and ends up in the hospital, where he tunes in to hear Carson Daly talking about karma and he decides to change his life.

Earl makes up a list of everything he has done wrong and sets out to make things right, one list item at a time. This is the premise for the show and it really works. Each episode sees Earl focusing on one thing on his list. Items get added as he goes along, and occasionally he'll take care of a couple in one episode. But with a list of more than 250 things, the show has a solid base to work with. And when he starts doing things on the list, the ticket ends up back in his hands, reinforcing his belief in karma.

Along for the ride with Earl is his simple brother Randy (Ethan Suplee). Randy's simple mind and uncluttered thinking make for some great comedy. It is obvious the two brothers care about each other a lot, though they do have their differences.

The brothers rent a motel room and befriend the hotel maid Catalina (Nadine Velazquez), a beautiful illegal immigrant who immediately steals Randy's attention. She helps the brothers out on occasion as they try to make right all the things that Earl has done wrong in his life.

Stealing the show, however, is Earl's ex-wife Joy, played to perfection by the beautiful Jaime Pressly. If you were thinking of a "queen of the trailer park" type, Joy would be it and Pressly has her nailed. It seems Earl met Joy while he was drunk and didn't notice she was pregnant. Then, a few years later Joy had another baby, but he was black. So with two kids that weren't his own, Earl wasn't living the great life. Joy divorces Earl in the pilot to be with her black baby's real father, Darnell Turner (Eddie Steeples), a waiter at the gang's hangout, the Crab Shack, thus earning him the nickname Crabman. These two characters are really great together and Joy's quest to get her hands on Earl's newfound money and Crabman's desire to remain friends with Earl play off each other really well.

The season tracks Earl through the ups and downs as he confronts people from his past, including the one-legged woman he stole a car from, Donnie Jones, who he sent to jail, Kenny James, a boy he picked on as a kid, his father Carl (guest star Beau Bridges) whom he lost an election, and a jilted-ex turned bounty hunter, played wonderfully by guest star Juliette Lewis. As the season goes along viewers learn a lot about Earl and just where he comes from and how he became who he is.

This DVD set was well done, with a number of commentaries. Each of the main characters does at least one, while Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee each chip in on a number. Creator Greg Garcia and director Mark Buckland also sit in on most of the commentaries. There is a great gag reel and a behind the scenes featurette. Perhaps the best extra is the "lost pilot" called Bad Karma. Instead of listening to Carson Daly, Earl listens to Stewie Griffin and makes a list of people who screwed him over and sets out to do the same to them. This was pretty funny because it showed a side of the characters that you never saw on the real show.

This was a great set of one of the best comedies on television now. For those who have never seen the show, if you want to see a comedy about someone trying to change for the better, you can't do much better than My Name is Earl.

Wow!

I cannot remember when was the last time I watched a sitcom that is worth watching.

They don't make good sitcoms like Seinfeld, The simpsons, King of Queens, Everybody hates chris, etc.

But, My Name Is Earl is a BIG exception.

It is in my opinion a fresh idea, with the perfect casting (Favorite Characters: Earl, Randy,Crabman).

And yes the show makes me laugh out loud.

I only hope that all the upcoming seasons continue to be well written, and conitnue to make me roll on the floor laughing.

Looking forward to buying the season 1 of on DVD.

Cheers,

Nawaf

I tend to be skeptical of all hype, whether about sports figures or commercial products or film reviews, but particularly about "critically acclaimed" TV series (comedies especially, since I am admittedly not an easy laugh). Most of these so-called "original" and "brilliant" shows are almost invariably formulaic, predictable, unimaginative, unoriginal, and uninteresting mediocrity that are predictably shilled by a largely conformist and toadying group of "entertainment critics" who often pander to the networks' program marketing and who themselves probably have never actually written a script, (and for the most part don't have a clue what is in fact good), but strive to maintain their credentials by raving about the "right" shows in a scarcely veiled act of symbiosis between the networks and the mainstream outlets where these critics/shills ply their dubious trade. Far too often, something unique or original or unorthodox meets with disdain or indifference, while meritless offal is undeservedly touted. But once in a while, there is a program that critics and audiences (not just the really stupid ones that watch "reality" shows) all can laud. MY NAME IS EARL is one such show.

I first saw this show inadvertently, on the big TV screens at the gym. I started laughing out loud within just a few minutes. This influenced me to watch more episodes, which in turn convinced the Mrs. and myself to buy the first season, which we missed in its original broadcast. After having seen each episode of the first season, I don't think there is a bad or weak one in the whole series, although there are some that do stand out as favorites.

For those few who might not be familiar with the show, it's about an inveterate ne'er-do-well named Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) who continues his life of petty theft and mayhem until one day winning a big prize from a scratch-off lotto ticket, which he loses moments later in a bizarre accident. While in the hospital, Earl comes to the conclusion that his poor quality of life - in particular his painful loss of fortune - is a result of karmic forces aligned against him. To regain some measure of good fortune, he begins a determined quest to live a better life and to try and right some of the wrongs he has done. No sooner does he begin this quest than his winning ticket is miraculously returned to him by the providential wind, thereby providing the funds for his mission.

The show's premise is both creative and interesting, in addition to being very well-written. The stories are an imaginative foray into different subplots which cleverly ties the various elements together in an ending which is not only satisfying, but also adroit.

The biggest pleasant surprise is the wonderful effectiveness of the cast. I was not an especially big fan of Jason Lee (I don't like Kevin Smith films), but he is so good in the lead role (capturing the clumsy but earnest intentions and hamheaded determination of the character), that it is difficult to imagine anybody else being able to play that role with any comparable skill. The other biggest surprise was Jaime Pressly, whose acting career has largely consisted of straight-to-video or late-night cable low budget B- movies. Though she had been making the transition towards comedies, she excels in her role of Joy (Earl's ex-wife and occasional nemesis). She has really hit the mark in terms of her comic timing, delivery, and expressions. The rest of the main cast includes Ethan Suplee, a capable journeyman character actor with a surprisingly long and diverse resume' of roles, plays Earl's simple but mostly good-natured brother Randy; Eddie Steeples plays Darnell (aka Crabman), Joy's laid-back new husband (she divorced Earl while he was in traction in the hospital) who Earl still remains friends with; the scorching hot Nadine Velasquez (yummy!) plays Catalina, the paradoxically worldly yet naive (and highly sexy) maid who works at the rundown motel where Earl and Randy live. Also, she's really attractive. Add to this a wealth of talented and familiar guest appearances and you have the right crew for this remarkable vessel.

The show works for a variety of reasons, and all factors not only work well but exceptionally so. Of all the different types of entertainment viewing options (films and/or TV), comedies are usually first preference, although again I tend to be a tough audience. In addition to the laugh-out-loud humor, it is very satisfying to see a show about someone trying to redeem himself and help others WITHOUT ALL THE SANCTIMONY AND SELF-ADULATION that other programs with less merit would purport to have. It has become a staple of entertainment for our family, and countless others. The only thing I enjoy more than watching the episodes are watching them with family and friends and seeing the enjoyment they also have in watching it. There is no show (or anything for that matter) that everyone will like, but I am confident that this show will be received favorably by those looking for great humor, good writing, engaging stories, likable (if somewhat dysfunctional) characters, and a positive message.

There are two reasons to buy a DVD set for a series: One, no commericals and two, the extras. Well, Earl has a GREAT amount of extras you'll just love. The 'reverse karma' idea is genius. You get a whole episode to watch. Many deleted scenes and a host of commentary is well worth the money. For Earl fans, it's a definate collectable. I don't have to tell you how funny and witty each episode is, if you're reading this you already know what a gem this show is!

4.5 stars

The first few episodes of Earl are purty dang funny, and the rest of the season is solid. The premise is simple, the characters clearly defined (and in the case of Joy, impeccably portrayed), and let's face it, any network tv show about karma gets an extra star for that alone.

We laughed a lot while watching this first season. I'd recommend it if you enjoy ironic comedy and a healthy dose of dumbassness. There are many moments of real hilarity.

The second season falls into all the usual traps, though, so this may be as good as this show gets.

Head and shoulders above normal tv sitcoms...but then that's not saying much.