My Name is Earl Season One DVD Review

"You understand the kind of guy who does naught yet wrong entities and then surprises why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every period somethin' good happened apt me, somethin' bad was all waitin' approximately the turn. Karma. That's when I accomplished I had to alteration. So I made a list of anything bad I've ever done and, an at one, I'm gonna make up for always my faults. I'm fair trying to be a better person. My appoint is Earl." - Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) in the "My Name is Earl" prologue credits

My Name is Earl: Season One DVD Review

By Jonathan Boudreaux

Karma is a funny thing. For years, NBC prevailed Thursday nights with manifold 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,Hunter Series, the network seemed to squander the opportunity to find the afterward big sitcom. Instead, it programmed what can maximum generously be depicted as filler. (Remember Union Square, Stark Raving Mad, Cursed, and Inside Schwartz? Didn't calculate so.) The network itself seemed both stark raving crazy 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 web premiere of season two. Jason Lee (Almost Famous) stars as Earl Hickey, a petty thief, scam artiste, and all around ne'er-do-well. One daytime when purchasing "a package of smokes, a pair Lotto scratchers, and a tallboy at 10:00 in the mornin'" from a regional expedience cache, he is overjoyed to detect that he is the lucky champion of $100,000.00. So overjoyed, in truth, 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) later their booze-soaked first appointment. He was too drunk to realize that she was six months productive at the time. They named the children Dodge because she remembers that his daddy drove a truck. A few months later, Joy was fertile anew. Earl Jr. had a decidedly darker complexion than Earl Sr. - he also had a bushy afro that saw suspiciously like that of Darnell (Eddie Steeples), a waitress at the Crab Shack - but Earl loves the kid anyway. Earl is also saddled with a sweet but speechless younger brother, Randy (Ethan Suplee). When Joy brings him divorce papers while he's lying in the hospital mattress,Cold Case, Earl tries to determine how to get his life back in order. He gets his respond from an uncommon source: while aisle surfing, he stumbles across Carson Daly discussing the mind of karma - what goes around comes around.

Earl decides that he have to have lost his Lotto stamp 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 decease to damage up with a girl. He even stole a motorcar from a one-legged matron! He and Randy shake into a crummy motel where they befriend mistress Catalina (Nadine Velazquez) and obtain to go intersection asset off of his list. When his winning lottery stamp literally comes flying behind into his life, Earl realizes that he has finally base his intention.

My Name is Earl successfully combines several styles of humor - including slapstick and irony - that will appeal to viewers on many assorted 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 wondered what those asswipes in the medium get away with. There's a picture of the fatuous douche bag on the bottom. Shot himself in the arm." This is an excruciatingly funny critique on both our society and the characters themselves.

This commute takes area in one of the season's funniest episodes, "Monkeys in Space." The douche sack in question is one of Earl's antique pals, Hank Lange (Carnivale's Tim DeKay). Since Earl once ruined his birthday celebration, he decides to make up for it by giving Hank one extra special day ahead he gets transferred to state prison. Hank's three requests sound cozy enough - he absences to read his hometown periodical, have donuts from his preference donut mart, 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 send everyday, but the cantankerous coot is confined to a wheelchair, lives on the top ground of an apartment intricate, is terrified to use the hoist (discern the bit about the wheelchair), and refuses to let Earl retard 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 scamper the donut shop. Grandma's extremely dry eyes absence to be lubricated every ten minutes or her eyelids will mallet to her eyeballs, but she hates the drips. All of the missions take so long that Earl never seems to be capable to make it to the jail before visiting hours are over, even when he wakes up an hour earlier every day. This episode plays favor a clever variation on Groundhog's Day, and each scene is funnier than the final. (Those involving Grandma's eye-drops belong in the comedy lobby of reputation).

The series is so successful because it manages to mingle brutal humor with affectingly heartfelt moments. A major subplot in "Monkeys in Space," case in point, centers on Randy trying to ascertain 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 mommy 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 antecedent, so this might certify to be an impossible task. Earl decides that his best wager is to repossess his father's car. Earl lost it in a shuffle marathon 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 distinct race, which leads to an amusing showdown involving foot sucking, a "snakedog," and the perils of smoking. The feelingful payoff, however, occurs when Earl discovers that it wasn't his dad's car - the car was averaged to be a gift for him. They were going to refurbish it attach as a father/son project, but then Earl "drove it into a lake." Earl and Carl finally reach a détente when they use the chapters 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 mother. Earl always seemed to ruin Christmas for Joy when they were married. (His awards to her throughout the years embody savored condoms, batteries, and her car keys.) With Randy's aid, he tries to win her a car in a radio contest. Things work awry when Joy's parents show up in their RV to commemorate the holiday. It seems that Joy not very got around to telling her parents that she divorced Earl and married a black man out of terror that her racist dad might no leave her the family business, Darville Waterbeds. Earl reluctantly agrees to melodrama onward with Joy's mystery so that he doesn't mar this Christmas, also. It soon becomes evident that everyone in the family has a nasty mini mysterious alternatively two. Can they put everything alongside and have a merry holiday?

The season ends with "Number One," the very first item on Earl's list. Crossing number one off of his list ends up pricing 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 comic episode explores what actually happened on the day Earl won his award, production it a terrific bookend for the season.

One cause the series is so successful is because of the large representations given by the actors. Lee perfectly captures either halves of Earl's individuality - the conniving schemer and the charming do-gooder. Suplee is eerily persuasion as mouth-breathing dolt Randy. Pressly is downright gifted as Joy. She lights up every scene she's in. Steeples and Velazquez don't always have a lot to do, but either manage to paint big laughs.

The first season also traits a relating 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 slender, explicit keepcases, both of which hold a pair of discs. The front of the first circumstance features a photo of Earl while Randy takes the spotlight on the second case. The back of each circumstance features a listing of episode titles, airdates, and summarize synopses. The cases slide into a cardboard outer sleeve.

The chief DVD menus employ a scratch-off lottery ticket theme. From this menu, viewers can play all of the episodes, go to the individual episodes list, choose language alternatives or outlook the special features menu. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are not scene selection menus.