WHAT do you get when bad taste meets good writing?
In the case of NBC’s crazy new sitcom, the politically incorrect “My Name Is Earl,” you git sumpin’ funnier than a three-wheeled pick-up truck full of constipated pigs. Or something.
“Earl” is the ongoing saga of a slacker/thief/redneck named, well, Earl (Jason Lee), who finds the meaning of life one night while watching “Last Call With Carson Daly.”
A guest on the show asks Daly to what he attributes all his good fortune in life, and Daly says, “karma.” He goes on to explain that if you do a good deed, you get a good deed in return. And the same is true for bad deeds.
A light goes off in Earl’s head which, considering he’s not a high-wattage guy to begin with, is quite a big deal.
Luckily, enlightenment comes, as it often does, when he needs it most. Earl’s wife, Joy (Jaime Pressly), who has two kids by two other men during their marriage, is leaving him while he’s laid up in the hospital recovering from getting run over by a little old lady, which in turn caused him to lose his $100,000 winning Lotto ticket.
If he corrects his karma, Earl figures, his life will follow suit and heck, it’ll be just a matter of time before he’s on the road to wealth and success – or maybe just more rack and ruin.
Karma correction involves more than lip service of course – it involves making amends with everyone he’s ever shafted, cheated, stolen from, beaten up and otherwise tortured with his mere presence. The list is long enough to carry Earl, incidentally, through several TV seasons.
Earl sets off on his quest with his moron-of-abrother, Randy (Ethan Suplee), and the hot maid (Nadine Velazquez)
they’ve met at the motel after getting thrown out of their trailer by Joy (so that Darnell, the crabman, could move in).
First up on the list is Kenny, Earl’s former classmate and geek supreme whom he tortured day in and day out. Earl decides he needs to not only make amends but to correct all that’s wrong with Kenny’s boring life.
When he barges into Kenny’s perfectly neat little house, he realizes that what Kenny is missing is a woman, so he hires his friend, the over-the-hill hooker, to help get him over the, ah, hump.
Whoops. Kenny, it turns out, plays for the other team. Or at least he’d like to play for the other team, but he’s been too scarred by Earl’s childhood torment to ever even have had a date. Things, as you can imagine, go from bad to horribly funny when Earl and Randy . . . oh well, never mind.
Shoot. I’d love to tell y’all everything, but if I did, I’d be lower than a raccoon’s bee-hind. No Dorothy, you’re not in the big city anymore.
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“My Name Is Earl”
[***] (Three stars)
Tonight at 9 on NBC/Ch. 4