TV: Mayberry on Crack aka My Name Is Earl

My Name Is Earl. NBC, Thursday nights. One of the few audience favorites of a lackluster fall. Along the way, it's been hailed by some as "innovative" and therein lies the problem.

There's nothing "fresh" about My Name Is Earl. The concept is Mayberry on Crack. "Not taped before a studio audience!" scream some. Which make us wonder exactly how far back some "experts" and their knowledge go?

What it reminds us of is the sort of bragging the "geniuses" behind Molly Dodd did (to Rolling Stone as that show was about to start airing). Earl, Jason Lee, is Andy Taylor . . . "trashed." Earl represents America about as well as Molly Dodd represented American women. Which is to say, not very well at all. And the correlation of Earl to America v. Molly Dodd to American women, that's the sort of "critical" thought we can hear from the gadflys who haunt the mythical water coolers. We're a bit tired of lazy critics who constantly play the game of men represent a country and women only represent a subsection of the country (their own gender). But that notion of "representation" is also at the heart of the show.

Earl and company, a bunch of "good old boys," get to coast on warm feelings and the only damn life in the show comes from Jamie Pressly's character of Joy. The show wants to be cute and huggable, but it knows no one will watch a half-hour of whimsy, so it has it both ways by letting the men be cuddly while the main female character is a total bitch.

It's not just that Joy is a bitch and that she's the lead female. By that we mean, it's not just that we've got a stereotype with no alternative lead offered. It's that the show wants to play it as though it's likeable and good natured and many are buying into that.

How do you update The Andy Griffith Show? Apparently turning Andy Taylor into a small town thief instead of a sheriff isn't enough, it's also necessary to turn Thelma into the town nightmare. All the praise for the warm fuzzy ("inspirational" is a favorite word) fails to capture how nasty this show is and how hateful the words that flow out of Pressly's mouth are.

This passes for "charming." Men become a little more petty criminal but keep their hearts of gold while everyone goes to town on Joy and the cheap laughs ensue. Somewhere Aunt Bea's mouth is dropping.

She probably also wonders about Randy Hickey (played Ethan Suplee) and exactly how the hell someone decided that Opie and Barney could be blended into one character? That "blend" works about as well as you'd expect, which is to say not at all.

But the blend does provide the easy chuckle when viewers see Randy and Earl sleeping together. They're brothers! Everything about this show is designed for the maximum comfort of the easily shocked.

Which is why the bland Catalina exists. She's in a few scenes each episode and rarely has anything to do. So why is she part of the cast? To allow someone to go to town on Joy. Yes, My Name Is Earl, like the Bully Boy, hides behind the skirts of women. (For Earl it's Catalina, for the Bully Boy? Katherine Harris, Karen Hughes, Condi Rice . . .)

There's nothing "updated" about the attitude towards women. There's nothing here worth praising. But your water cool critics, who must have gleaned their "critical knowledge" at the water coolers, don't like to comment on that. They like to pretend that this isn't the show where a man can be outraged that another man slept with one of his wives until he finds out which one and then they can share a chuckle and bond over what a tramp she was.

The women don't get to share chuckles. We'll give the show credit for casting Nadine Velazquez as Catalina but we're still waiting for her to be given the chance to strut her stuff. Instead she's stuck playing the walking stereotype (supposedly benign) of the earth mother closer to the land and the mysteries of the world -- a character who only leaves her laconic pose when it's time to lash out at Joy. To do the work that the male character on this show are too scared to do and, in the process, offer up yet another tired catfight.

We'll note that Eddie Steeples plays supporting character Darnell (Joy's husband) and, again, we're glad to see that they've cast someone who brings more diversity to the look of the show. (Steeples is African-American.) But until they find something for Darnell to do, he's not impacting anything but the look.

"Just the good old boys, never meaning no harm?" If true, that wouldn't change the fact that the show is harmful.

We know people working on My Name Is Earl and, after seeing the first episode, before it aired, intended to take a pass on it. The show goes nowhere. Episode after episode. It's Andy Taylor, er Earl, strolling through the neighborhood getting cheap chuckles from the "locals." But then the show started getting praised as "innovative" and "groundbreaking." And then it moved to Thursdays.

Were it not for the deep abiding hatred of women, the show would go nowhere. Pressly has the talent to provide laughter. When one of her sons points out he's five and not four as he looks at the four candles on his birthday cake, Pressly can wring a laugh as she says, "I know how old you are, honey. One, two, three, four, five!" while she puts her lit cigarette into the cake. But after you're done laughing, you're left with a nasty taste in your mouth.

We're going to say that no one involved with the show meant for it to be this offensive. That doesn't change the fact that it is. Or the fact that without Pressly the show's title would be My Name Was Earl. ("I lasted four episodes in the fall of 2005.") Cheap, nasty laughs at the expense of women and people who are working class may delight some but we didn't attend Water Cooler University so we must have missed the whole class on how when you're (male) leads are so flacid and dull it's okay to viciously attack everyone that surrounds them.