Writing Archive

KARMA'S BITCH

"You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks?...I'm exactly who you think I am."
—My Name Is Earl

Earl J. Hickey pretty much could be one of my cousins. But a white or lighter-skinned cousin, of course. (Like Felipe from Kansas, he of the golden surfer-locks!) But a cousin who would have to leave the perilous pathway of vice behind. (No more grand larceny or trafficking of any kind.) And instead of an evangelical awakening by way of getting Born Again in the Name of the Lord, primo would follow the mysterious ways of abstract Eastern philosophies spelled out at the bottom of a longneck beer or prophesied in the ashes of menthol-flavored hang-overs, on a Karmic quest described alternately as a "Crusade," a "Mission," or "that Robin-Hood-Batman-Jesus stuff," an epic tour of duty through the Casa de Pizza & Games o' life, an honest-to-goodness stab at righting all the wrongs and making good on all the mistakes and bad choices.

"How should I have my chicken? Grilled or McNuggetted?"
—Randy, Episode 8, "Joy's Wedding"

Now in its second season, My Name Is Earl is an odd piece of shit-kicker chic for the network that once treated us all to the Cosby kids; a downward dip into trailer-trash tropes, like Tall Boys at 10 in the morning and useless-loser lotto stubs; a picaresque bender across landscapes of ugly Americana, convenience-store parking lots, abandoned car-washeterias, and rickety dive-bars that serve un-licensed ingredients in the crab stew, to the tune of karaoke beatboxing and banjos.

Our eponymous hero, played by Jason Lee, experiences spiritual enlightenment after winning $100,000 in scratch-lotto and then immediately going to ER, victim of a hilarious hit-and-run. Losing his winning ticket and his wife Joy (Jaime Pressly), Earl sits in the hospital moping, whereupon he sees Carson Daly on TV explain his personal philosophy of karma: do good things and good things will happen to you, do bad things and bad things will happen to you.

On the mend, Earl writes a list of more than 200 bad things he's done in life, and he sets out to right every single wrong. His dim-witted, slack-jawed brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) at first protests, pointing out their last dollar spent on a ratty '70s-deco motel room. But when Karma seemingly hands the $100,000 lotto ticket back to Earl on a random breeze, the brothers and their new friend Catalina (Nadine Velazquez), the motel maid (who illegally came to America in a box), decide that the path of Karma is the "roadmap to a better life."

And so, every episode, like Fantasy Island at a rodeo stockyard, Earl tries to mark items off his list by making up in some way for his past misdeeds, such as #58 ("fixed a high school football game"), #84 ("faked my own death to break up with a girl"), #27 ("made fun of people with accents"), #112 ("let someone serve jail time for a crime I committed"), #139 ("stole beer from a golfer"), etc., etc., etc. Blazing ethical trails through a southwestern skyline and low-brow locales, Earl sums up the show, with every intro, as his life-quest of self-definition: "one by one I'm going to make up for all my mistakes...I'm just trying to be a better person...My name is Earl..."

Through it all, Earl develops a moral sensibility in his bootleg version of Karma, which is after all "something Carson Daly came up with." He experiences moral states (such as guilt) and ethical conundrums (such as settling conflicting interests and tracing the negative impacts of his choices). And in Episode 16 of Season One, when Earl tries to dodge a prior duty on his list in order to spend time with a love interest, he realizes that he cannot shirk his obligations to Karma. You can't run from Karma because, as Earl puts it, Karma "knows where your mama parks your house." The tougher items on his list only draw him deeper into commitment to the logic of Karma, further testing his will to remain on the path of integrity.

Earl is, in the final analysis, "Karma's Bitch."

In the recently released Season One DVD collection, creator Greg Garcia talks about the origins of Earl in terms of his own upbringing in a trailer park, with a mixed-race family and a ne'er-do-well father who decided one day to do the right thing. The earnest subtext of telling stories inspired by his dad comes across in the sometimes melodramatically cute and always farcical resolutions to Earl's ethical dilemmas. And in a DVD extra entitled "Bad Karma," an alternate-universe Earl gets inspired by Family Guy's Stewie Griffin (rather than Daly) and decides to exact vengeance on anyone who ever did him wrong — in this dystopic vision, Earl gets cut to the quick by the ubiquitous influence of Karma, suggesting the moral backbone to every absurd episode.

Creator Garcia seems an earnest sort himself, as he chats on a DVD extra (shot from the passenger seat of his muscle car): On the importance of being Earl, Garcia waxes sincere, confessing also that the first time he met Earl-actor Jason Lee he was drunk and hopped up on crystal meth.

The DVD extras cover such gems and more, like the story of Lee and Garcia going to bat with the network over Lee's ridiculous moustache. With multiple flashbacks, quickly moving cuts and edits, no laugh track, and a mini-cinematic style, Earl has managed to chip away at more of my post-tenure time with a nice TV lineup on Thursdays crested by The Office.

And Earl does, after all, remind me of certain cousins, the biker bandidos and franchise narcos, the juvie veteranos and lowriders who introduced me to kung-fu movies and the true meaning of the "wife-beater" tank-top.

I'm reminded of my cousins Rick DeRoulet, recently passed, and Rolando Garcia, no longer with us. I think about my time with them and the rest of my cousins as a teenager in Wichita, Kansas, memories flavored by B-grade intoxication, blurred and slurred moments of aimless cruising with a cuz or two.

Where would they be now, had they chosen the mantle of Karma? Would they still have their lives, their livers?

"You know in them old cartoons when people would get so hungry and confused that they'd think other people was food?...You're a taquito with a moustache!..."
—Randy to Earl, Final Episode, Season One

Gritty details — like microwaveable cheeseburgers from a vending machine, liquid-paper huffing, and neon Lone Star Beer signs missing a few letters — bring me back to my own felt sense of AmeriKarma. "No more generic sweetie bits for you, brother...You're riding the Karma train, now!"

Posted by Benjamin at November 13, 2006 05:52 PM