My Name Is Earl
My Name Is Earl is a new sitcom which is running on NBC. Last night they were running the first three episodes back to back and...yes...I watched all three of them.Can't say I'll be dipping back into that well for more entertainment.
Here's the basic premise of the show. Earl is a con-man, thief and lazy bum who one day wins the lottery...only, within seconds of winning, is hit by a car, loses the ticket, and ends up in the hospital. As Earl says, "It was the happiest ten seconds of my life."
As he's lying there in the hospital, his wife tricks him into signing divorce papers, leaving him with hardly anything...and as he's watching a TV show with Carson Daly, Daly starts talking about Karma and Earl has a bit of an epiphany. He realizes..."That's what's wrong with my life...I've been rotten in life, and now life is being rotten to me." As he says in one of the show's more intelligent moments, "Life is killing me."
So, with this realization under his belt, he makes a list of all the unkind things he's ever done to anyone (ranging from picking on a kid in elementary school to giving people cancer with his second-hand cigarette smoke), and sets out to make amends for all his lowlife ways.
Could be good. Could be clever. And, I can't deny, it certainly had some funny moments in those first three episodes. But there are some serious flaws with this show...
First, there's the fact that there really aren't any people in this show. They seem like cardboard cutouts designed to look like grossly caricatured people. There's the greedy-self-absorbed-cheating-ex-wife, the dumber-than-a-stump, number-than-a-pounded-thumb brother, the georgeous-latino-housekeeper, the psychotic-turned-to-Jesus-ex-con, the exceptionally-femmy-gay-guy...
...and none of them are at all believable as actual people.
Which is okay, I suppose...except that, since we don't have any reason to care about any of these cardboard cutouts, the show will have to rely on humor bits which will grow stale quickly, and they'll have to escalate the crassness of the show in order to keep peoples' attention.
But that's not my real problem with the show (goodness knows, the characters aren't any less believable than the characters of Gilligan's Island, and I loved that show!
). My problem comes from how pathetically easy it is for Earl to "make amends" for all his terrible behavior, and then becomes best of buddies with these people who used to hate his guts.How to make up for picking on the gay guy when he was a kid? Take him to a gay bar to help him pick up a partner, and then he'll be your best of friends forever.
How to make up for letting your friend take the rap and go to prison for a crime you committed? Hope that, because of his newfound faith in Jesus, he'll forgive you and you won't have to make up for anything.
Of course, his mother won't forgive you, but that's okay...you can just kidnap her and tie her to a chair until she quits smoking three days later and is forever grateful to you for rescuing her from an early grave.
The thing is, life is rarely that simplistic. Nor do we often find such a simplistic one-to-one relationship between the good we do and the good we recieve. If life was that simplistic, only the stupidest of people would not "catch on" and start living life in such a way that all kinds of good things happen to them.
No, it's a messy world we live in, and those who try to do good often get it thrown right back in their faces, while those who do wrong seem to prosper.
King David was a man who often came face to face with the messiness of life, and at one point he asked this question: "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart all the day? How long will my enemy be exalted over me?" (Psalm 13:1-2)
David knew what Earl has yet to figure out...life is complicated and messy, the wicked often prevail while the righteous seem to fall flat on their faces. And while it's possible that things might "balance out" in the end, the process of getting there is a whole lot more complicated and painful than you could imagine.
And really, if you look at "good deeds" the way Earl is looking at them...they aren't really good deeds at all, are they? Because they are done to improve the quality of Earl's own life...which makes them inherently selfish...
In all of this, the good news about My Name Is Earl is that, with such incredibly unbelievable characters, nobody is likely to take it seriously enough that they will believe the equally unbelievable premise that a bad deed is guaranteed to make you lose your lottery ticket, and a good one is guaranteed to bring it back again.
Posted On Oct 9, 2005 at 1:57 PM
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