My Name Is Earl“I Won’t Die With a Little Help From My Friends”
Original Air Date: April 3, 2008
Laura Kelley, TwoCents Reviewer
After a long writers strike filled with less-than-stellar reality shows, the return of My Name is Earl was a welcome one. When I first heard Paris Hilton would be making a cameo, my immediate physical reaction was not pleasant, but the episode thankfully did not disappoint. I really enjoyed this unusual episode and its subconscious-sitcom twist. After an odd Jeff Zucker recap (to presumably make studio heads seem actually human after said strike) the episode began with Karma finally bringing Earl his good thing in the form of Billie, played by a fairly likeable Alyssa Milano, only to “plow into her at 40 miles per hour” exactly as it did to Earl when we last saw him. After being hit by a car, Earl retreats into a place where he felt safe as a child: television sitcoms.
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My Name Is Earl
ReplyDelete“I Won’t Die With a Little Help From My Friends”
Original Air Date: April 3, 2008
Laura Kelley, TwoCents Reviewer
After a long writers strike filled with less-than-stellar reality shows, the return of My Name is Earl was a welcome one. When I first heard Paris Hilton would be making a cameo, my immediate physical reaction was not pleasant, but the episode thankfully did not disappoint. I really enjoyed this unusual episode and its subconscious-sitcom twist. After an odd Jeff Zucker recap (to presumably make studio heads seem actually human after said strike) the episode began with Karma finally bringing Earl his good thing in the form of Billie, played by a fairly likeable Alyssa Milano, only to “plow into her at 40 miles per hour” exactly as it did to Earl when we last saw him. After being hit by a car, Earl retreats into a place where he felt safe as a child: television sitcoms.
In his dream world, Earl is married to Billie, and they live in a house filled with toasters. As Earl dreams, Randy tries to save him, but the cop and ambulance driver are only interested in Billie, for obvious reasons. Randy steals the ambulance to make up for running away the last time Earl was in mortal danger and picks up Joy, Darnell, and Catalina because “mom and dad aren’t here” and he doesn’t know where the hospital is.” No one pursues him because, as the cop says, “our Al Gore wannabe mayor decided to be green and replace my squad car with a bicycle.” Inside the ambulance, Joy utters my favorite line of the episode: “Earl really should’ve put look both ways before you cross the street on his list.” After Catalina opens the door so Earl’s spirit can escape, Joy and Earl fall out of the ambulance on the gurney. Meanwhile, in his sitcom world, Joy and Darnell move in next door and Earl lets Randy move in to keep Joy out, and Randy finally gets that candy corn out of his ear (and then eats it.) They find Earl at a “she-trucker’s” house—the hilarious Jane Lynch, in a role I actually hope she reprises later on—and they use Joy as a diversion to get him out of the house, but not before the she-trucker shoots him. Earl gets to the hospital, and everyone tries to wake him from the coma using a variety of stimuli, from Joy’s breasts (my second favorite line was, “Squeeze, you’re a vegetable, not a fruit”) to Catalina’s celebrity magazines, to Darnell’s postcards, to firecrackers. I liked Joy’s tactic best, but the firecrackers were a close second. Please, do not use firecrackers or any explosive to wake your loved one from a coma. It is marginally effective at best.
Details of what’s happening around him have bled into his dream world, including Paris Hilton, whose only line (“that’s hot,” of course) is repeated three times proving she can read at least one cue card. Randy, Joy and Darnell turn to a faith healer called “God’s Little Finger,” who initially refuses to help because he saw Joy and Earl stealing on TV in their “Smokey and the Tube Top Bandit” days, but relents after Joy puts “made a healer boy scared of his own hands” on the list. To get the boy to heal Earl, they also make a video of fake good deeds performed by Joy, which I loved (especially when she teaches a trapped family’s pug to swim to safety but leaves the family behind.) At the hospital, God’s Little Finger learns that his faith healing was a scam created by his greedy father, and he is crossed off Earl’s list after he is able to live a normal life. The episode comes to a close with Randy’s realization that he can save Earl by crossing items off his list, but Earl remains in his coma.
What did everyone think of Earl’s return? I personally really liked the episode’s fun show-within-a-show premise and was thrilled to have part of NBC’s awesome Thursday comedy lineup back after almost five months of the painfully unfunny Celebrity Apprentice. The strike-enforced hiatus seems to have benefited the show, which was weaker than previous seasons at times in the past new episodes, and it’s great to see My Name is Earl heading toward its familiar premise again. The episode had every hallmark of a good Earl episode—lots of Joy, Randy helping save the day, a karmic intervention, and of course a horny she-trucker who used Earl as her love slave. And of course, an item was crossed off the karma list, albeit by Joy instead of Earl. I thought it was a classy move to use Paris Hilton extremely sparingly and not having her wear out her welcome (she even cooks bacon!) and as always the supporting cast was strong, with Ethan Suplee and Jaime Pressly in top form as Randy and Joy. The episode was all about small victories, from Randy’s removal of that piece of candy corn to Earl’s marginal improvement in a comatose state to Joy’s miraculously healed zit, and I’m very glad to have my favorite Camden County residents back. It’s been far too long.