Numbers Scratched Off: #50 – Kicked Tom out of the band
#51 – Slept with Ralph’s mom

Funniest moment: Randy and Earl dancing in a strobe light to “Mr. Roboto”

Plot: Earl makes amends with Tom, an elderly gentleman they kicked out of the band (consisting of Randy, Earl, Ralph, and Tom) just before their one and only performance. Seems Tom was making all the ladies a little weirded out.

Tom will only forgive Earl if he lets him back in the band. So they get the band back together only to have it disbanded again when it slips out that Earl slept with Ralph’s mom. The night after the concert Earl’s date fell unconscious and Randy’s mom was there and willing and…well one thing led to another.

The only way Ralph feels Earl can amend this problem is to let Randy kill him. He’s serious too and places a large handgun against Earl’s temple ready to do the deed. Earl manages to talk him out of it by vowing to marry Ralph’s mom.

They marry and everything goes well until Ralph realizes the marriage has not been consummated. Earl digs everything about the marriage – the home-cooked meals, the conversation, and the house cleaning – except for the idea of sleeping with Ralph’s mom.

Once again killing is threatened, but Earl is saved by Tom who begins a relationship with Ralph’s mom after the band played their second gig.

Rating: ***
Ralph is a new character to me. I suspect he’s been around in other episodes, but he felt kind of tossed in for the gag, and as such kind of knocked the appeal of the show down a notch. If I see him more, I may warm up to him.

The band gag was kind of lame as was the concept of sleeping with/marrying the old lady. Jason Lee pulls it off as usual with his abundant charm, and I can’t have anything but love for Ethan Suplee. There were a couple of great gags and that more than made up for the less-than-stellar plot

Best Gags:

• Joy playing “Red Rover” with some elderly folks at a home (which she is doing to help her pending court case). A lady with a walker is called and it takes her ten minutes to get across to the other side.

• Randy to some groovy chicks: “We’re rock stars. You can tell from my rock star pants. See all the zippers. Guess what’s in this zipper – licorice.”
  Groovy chick: Maybe I’ll see what’s in the other zippers.”
  Randy: “More licorice”
• Earl on sleeping with Ralph’s mom: “She wasn’t young, but she was conscious.”

Originally posted on October 07, 2006.

I know, I know, I’m late on this. I was exhausted Thursday night and I forgot about it Friday. So I’ll use my notes and my lagging memory to give this week’s run down.

While holding down a lady at the motel for her face waxing Earl decides to cross off number ninety-one to the list, “made fun of Maggie Lester for having a mustache.” In the requisite flashback, we see Maggie introduced to the class for the first time and Earl makes your basic Tom Selleck, joke with “Maggie PI.”

Earl and Randy drive out to Shady Grove which is something of a freak town, housing many folks from a traveling sideshow – there’s the super tall guy, the fat lady, the super short guy, the guy with hands like lobsters, and of course the bearded lady who happens to be Maggie Lester.

Earl has a nice afternoon with Maggie who happens to be a very nice lady and she forgives him for making fun of her. Randy has a good time feeling her beard Yet as he is leaving they poke fun at the rest of the freaks and Earl realizes he can’t take Maggie off the list until he learns not to make fun of people for their differences.

So, the freaks have a barbeque and Earl learns that they are all good people.

In the funniest joke of the night, Randy asks the guy with a giant horn on his head if he’s able to take his head on a plane. Horn head guy replies no, not since 9-11, but that they are all doing what they can.

In celebration of his new friends, Earl tries to take them all out for ice cream, but they refuse for they would be made fun of outside their comfort zone. Earl thinks that’s silly, but then remembers a time he was made fun of for being different – when he was young he couldn’t jump off the high dive because of his freakishly hairy nipples.

Earl confronts the coach who made him take off his shirt only to be told (and held to the ground by an ear pinch) that the coach did it to him so that he’d learn to appreciate his differences.

Earl gains confidence and decides to jump off the diving board, and invites all his freak friends to watch. They are at first hesitant, but eventually show up and everybody decides to jump in. Earl’s story concludes by showing all the freaks took on real jobs and are happy.

The Joy side plot revolves around her meeting her deaf lawyer and not being willing to accept her as a lawyer. There were some good gags over Joy being so politically incorrect to an obviously intelligent lawyer (played with usual aplomb by Marlee Martin). When Joy finally sucks it up and apologizes to the lawyer, she winds up laughing in her face over the way she talks.

Overall a good episode, but nothing spectacular. I am beginning to think that I would probably not watch the show that often it changed schedules and no longer be the lead into The Office.

Originally posted on September 29, 2006.

This week’s episode was different for two reasons: it didn’t involve a single item from the list, and it wasn’t particularly funny. It was also a direct continuation of last week’s episode, which may be totally different, but since I watched last season in non-sequential reruns I’m not sure about that.

Earl begins the episode by telling us that he begins most mornings thinking about the list, but on this morning he was thinking about other things, mainly going to court to help get Joy out of jail – then he recaps the events that happened in last week’s episode, landing Joy in jail in the first place.

The idea to create episodes that don’t involve the list seems like a decent one. The show is popular and it seems quite possible that the list could run dry before the show runs out of episodes, plus the concept of writing certain wrongs could become tiresome more quickly than the producers would like. But if tonight’s episode is any indication of how it will go without a list, Earl had better start thinking about his past mistakes more often.

The judge sets Joy’s bail at one million dollars due to this being her third strike. In flashback number one (or two if you count the opening recap) we see that Joy once tried to make counterfeit money by copying bills at a big copy center like Kinkos. Strike number two occurred when she was being fingerprinted for that crime and struck the officer due to him breaking her newly minted fingernails.

Randy, as usual, isn’t concerned with the events of the day, but with a walnut – he wants to see if the judge will crack it with his judge hammer. Amazingly, the judge obliges, even after tossing Joy out of court.

So, a million-dollar bail is set making it a cool $100,000s needed for a bondsman.

Earl no longer has that kind of money, but Randy makes a helpful list of folks they can borrow it from – Richie Rich, the Beverly Hillbillies, and the like – but the list of fictional characters is written on a Chubby’s Pork bag, and Earl thinks he might be able to borrow the cash from Chubby himself.

Chubby, played in full-on sleaze mode circa Striptease by Burt Reynolds, relents to the money request, but only if Earl can bring back his favorite dancer, who happens to be Catalina.

Turns out Catalina loved being a dancer, but her unusual method of jumping up and down was hazardous to local citizens – an old man died of a heart attack from watching her “assets” go boingy-boing. Thus she reserved herself to a life of cleaning motel rooms.

Ever the helpful lot, Earl and Randy (who can’t seem to think straight after Earl mentions Catalina being half-naked) track down the dead guy’s family and it turns out the old man was a slave driver in a sweatshop. His death has brought happiness to the sweat shop workers (for the son brought in a fan) and everything is better.

Catalina agrees to dance prompting Randy to ponder “which half’s going to be naked – I hope it is the front half.” But all doesn’t go well when Catalina finds out her dancing will get Joy out of jail. Catalina refuses to, as she puts it “jump for Joy” in what has to be the cheesiest clever pun in the history of television.

Joy agrees to apologize for all the wrongs she has committed against Catalina in hopes that she will agree to the dance. But as usual, Joy can’t play nice and the apology turns into a catfight over which of the two is hotter.

Somehow Joy convinces the judge to release her for a one-night Chubby dance in order to raise bail money. Joy gets drunk to calm her nerves and instead of dancing, she pukes all over the front row.

In the end, Catalina saves the day and agrees to dance – not for Joy, whom she still loathes, but for Earl and his quest to make people’s lives better.

Though in the episode, Earl was unable to scratch something off his list, the episode still revolved around him trying to help people out (in this case getting Joy out of jail, and Catalina back to dancing.) This causes me to ask what’s the point of moving away from the list if all you’re going to do is set up the same type of situation. Without the list, Earl seems a little unfocused. The show focused even more on juvenile gags (witness Randy’s long gag with Catalina’s half-nakedness) and less on any moral center involving karma.

Last year I only caught a couple of episodes of My Name is Earl. I enjoy Jason Lee in just about anything he does, but this show never really grabbed me. It had some funny bits, but the characters all seemed a little too dumb to be interesting and I kept myself busy with other things to watch much.

This summer, or as I like to call it, The Summer of TV Addiction, I began watching it regularly and now add it to my ever-growing selection of must-watch.

The season premiere starts with Earl deciding to scratch off Joy from his list. It seems he never agreed with her while they were married. In a series of flashbacks, we see Earl take sides with everybody but Joy including Randy (who grabs the potato chips with his toes) and a lobster (who squirted Joy while she was cutting it up.)

Earl finally takes Joy’s side by telling Darnell that he should throw Joy a surprise party even if she knows about it (thus ruining the surprise argues Darnell.)

Joy decides to buy a “disappearing” TV after watching Britney Spears and K-fed use one on their show.

Unfortunately, the TV is too big to fit inside the trailer and the store won’t take it back because there is gum inside the receipt. They attempt to watch the television outside in the yard, but the glare of the sun and motorcyclists keep them from it. After a rain the TV is completely ruined.

Joy again attempts to take the TV back. Declaring she is going to get her $3,000 back one way or another she steals a truck from the store.

Joy tries to sell the entire truck, not what’s in the truck mind you, to someone but he doesn’t buy due to the truck having the name of the store still written upon it. His friend, an Eastern European by the accent, says she’ll buy the truck, but when they arrive at Joy’s trailer, Darnell has landed the surprise birthday party a month early, scaring off the European.

Earl, still feeling generous, decides to help her unload the truck. They paint the name off the truck, then brilliantly decide to open the danged thing to see if the contents might be worth $3,000.

Oops, there is a man (a store employee) inside! After some thinking, they decide to order (in fake British accents no less) the man to blindfold himself and run out of the truck when they open the door. He obliges but crashes into a tree, knocking himself out.

Earl and Joy load him into the truck and drive off to a hospital. The truck runs out of gas along the way, and while Earl walks to get more fuel, Joy accidentally lets the man loose. She got hungry, you see, and opened the truck door looking for food. The man had taken off his clothes and stuffed them to look like he was unconscious, then whacked Joy on the head while she was looking at it.

Prompting the second-best line of the episode, “Son of a bitch he Ferris Bueller-ed me.”

Man, now in his underwear is caught by Joy and Earl and Randy, but Randy sticks the man in the front of the truck, instead of the back, prompting him to take off in the truck.

During the hot pursuit, Randy suggests they could cut out the man’s tongue so that he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone who he saw. Realizing that he could still draw them he suggests they cut off his fingers, prompting the best line of the show, “At least he’s thinking, he can’t help it if he’s not good at it.”

Earl decides he has helped Joy enough and lets the man escape. Joy is charged with stealing a truck and kidnapping and ends the episode in jail.

I read recently that the writers were going to focus more on the characters than on the list this season, and they seem to be off to a good start. Most of the episode had nothing to do with a list point, and in fact, the only item on the list “Take Joy’s Side” was done within a few minutes. Instead, the episode moved forward from the general concept of that item.

Joy got a lot of screen time and she ran with it. She’s always a funny character, but here she stole the best lines, played the best scenes and pretty much ruled the episode. It was a nice change of focus from the usual Earl/Randy relationship.