Earl

[robin_d_laws]

There’s been a lot of talk about this season’s bumper crop of serious message movies about the Iraq conflict, and how they’ve landed in theaters with a series of resounding thuds. Undoubtedly this is because they’re serious message movies, and who wants that?

Last week’s episode of My Name Is Earl, on the other hand, marked a true shift in the

Comments

[ex_gobi]

I dunno... Yeah, it was funny, but I think any subversive social commentary was a mitigated by focusing it on feuding trailer park bumpkins and panicky state fair attendees.

[robin_d_laws]

This episode made the show's central conceit, that Camden is America, clearer than ever before.

[ex_gobi]

*gasp*

God, I hope I'm Crabman.

[robin_d_laws]

So do we all, man. So do we all.

[richardthinks]

so that's how long it takes. 6 years. Not bad, really: longer than I would have thought. Would it have been longer if only a politically sensitive minority group had been affected?

[initialr]

Actually what surprised me was the extent to which they worked the dark prostitute humor.

"I never thought it would end like this, I always figured it would be at the hands of a team of JV football players."

I suppose it can be argued that the likes of Larry the Cable Guy have been ironically subverting the reactions for quite a bit longer though... not sure that everyone got the joke, or that he cared as long as he made piles of money.

[pope_guilty]

Dan Whitney really is a piece of shit, though.

[pope_guilty]

I like My Name is Earl's willingness to hop around in time. It suggests that they won't be able to write themselves into a corner easily.

[anonymous]

As much as I dearly love Earl, I felt the hour-long episode was pretty hit-or-miss. There were a lot of filler jokes that fell flat... it felt like the writers were trying to fill up an hour rather than prune and finesse everything into a 22-minute knockout. The filler jokes weakened the "social commentary" stuff, and you could tell when they got close to the really troublesome or prickly consequences of the whole War on Terror thing, they pulled back into something cartoonish and soothing