My Name is Earl: Season Three
Who watches this show? I mean, really. Is anyone ever really excited for the next gripping and important episode of My Name is Earl? No. Is it something you need to get on Blu-Ray? Definitely not. Is it good television? Hell yeah it is!
While My Name is Earl might not blow the lid off of any of television’s conventions, it definitely leaves you with a great taste in your mouth after every single episode. In a television world filled with cliff-hangers, gore, unbelievable amounts of special effects, and enough post-modern jokes to make you feel like you’re on television as we speak (mind explosion?), a show like My Name is Earl is incredibly refreshing. The show makes you giggle, laugh out loud at times, and does so all under the guise of the situation the show started off with: Earl is going through his list, making amends with all the people he has wronged in his life. Thankfully for the longevity of the show, Earl has done a LOT of bad things. His list goes up to the 200’s.
Through this season, we see Earl and his buddies go through something I really love to see on television shows that have been around for a few seasons – change. Third seasons of shows are often really great, and where a show really starts to either take off or go downhill (Buffy, for example, really came into its own in Season Three). All the characters are established, which only means good things for the situations we are going to see them in.
Earl starts off in jail for something he did last season (he took the fall for his ex-wife Joy, so she wouldn’t have to go to prison). He spends almost half the season in jail and the scenarios and storyline really do not get tired. This team of writers knows exactly how long to drag a storyline out and where to take it so that Earl always comes up on top; because in the end, he is our protagonist and no matter how funny, we want to see him succeed in finishing his list.
That’s another thing the show has going for it – the mystery of what is going to happen once Earl finishes his list. They touch upon that in this season, and the show goes places that a viewer like myself has wanted to see it go this entire time: Earl falls in love, Earl doubts his list, and Joy comes outside her character and does something sweet.
Speaking of Joy, Jaime Pressly really earns her Emmys in this season. Her character is the perfect blend of self-aware, proud, ignorant, yet not stupid, and completely bitchy and self-involved. Who doesn’t know a girl like that?
Joy finally stops being pregnant in this season, and a lot of the characters go through some minor changes, which is another commendable thing about this series. Not only is the end of every episode satisfying, but it leads into the next episode. See? You don’t always need a cliffhanger for people to watch every episode of your show! All you need to do is not start out with so much tension that all you do is try to top your first episode everytime you sit down and write another one with your writing team! Earl started off coasting and has kept that same pace and reliability throughout its run on NBC. Shows like this equal longevity and although they might not break any boundaries, the time they have on the network allows them to develop their characters so they can get into better, more complex, and even funnier situations.
This season also has one particularly brilliant episode that is a mockumentary of the making of an episode of COPS where all of the main characters get in some kind of trouble. The episode takes place the day of the first anniversary of 9/11. The topical jokes and jabs at ignorance and paranoia in this episode really show that the writers of this show know what they’re doing.
This is a nice show that can fill up time, will make you laugh, will be filled with cameos galore (Craig T. Nelson, Alyssa Milano, Jon Heder, Mike O’Malley, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Rappaport, and more) and is something relaxing to watch. It won’t bring you over the edge, you’ll have a hard time talking about it with friends, and it’s not going to change anything for you; but you’ll have a good time watching it and the show really “is what it is”.
My Name is Earl Season Three is available in stores now.
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