NBC Tuesday
First of all, yes, I really do like The Biggest Loser, which is the best thing in America's obsession with Weight Loss since Richard Simmons - himself, truly, a saint of our time.
But the show to watch is My Name Is Earl, which illustrates - at least as well as anything else I've seen in pop culture for a long, long time - Kierkegaard's dictum that life must me lived forward.
The premise of the show is that a guy named Earl (played, pretty brilliantly, by Jason Lee), while in recovery from a car accident, decides that he's going to make up for all the injustices he's commited in his life ("I'm talkin' about Karma") by making up a list of said things done wrong and crossing them off one by one. His ability to do this is helped (I gather from the opening sequence) by the fact that he won the lottery just before being hit by a car, and is assisted as well by his sidekick his brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) and the most incredibly hot Catalina (Nadine Velazquez, who was in the soap "Bold and the Beautiful").
Tonight's episode really begins with Earl's announcement that before he can go to some kind of county fair only after crossing off one more bad deed from the past off his list - the time he took free beers from a hole-in-one-golfer at a country club. He finds the golfer easily enough, but in the process of trying to right previous wrongs discovers that life is a little more complicated than he'd thought while dreaming up his list. Which isn't too much of a problem - he's able to cross this item off his list, as well as a few others - but it does mean that has to keep putting off a visit to the fair that his brother Randy had been looking forward to so much. His brother has decided that he actually hasn't been helping Earl enough, so when Earl decides that his own list has become a karma-wrenching obsession in itself (beautifully realized in 'Let me off this bus!' sequence that has magic pixie dust sprinkled all over it), together they are finally able to square the cosmic circle that Earl has been so earnest in pursuing. And then they ride off together in the Trans-Am (or is it a Camaro?) from Smokey and the Bandit. After writing this I now realize that I have captured none of the greatness of this truly awesome show. Watch it next week and see for yourself.
But the show to watch is My Name Is Earl, which illustrates - at least as well as anything else I've seen in pop culture for a long, long time - Kierkegaard's dictum that life must me lived forward.
The premise of the show is that a guy named Earl (played, pretty brilliantly, by Jason Lee), while in recovery from a car accident, decides that he's going to make up for all the injustices he's commited in his life ("I'm talkin' about Karma") by making up a list of said things done wrong and crossing them off one by one. His ability to do this is helped (I gather from the opening sequence) by the fact that he won the lottery just before being hit by a car, and is assisted as well by his sidekick his brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) and the most incredibly hot Catalina (Nadine Velazquez, who was in the soap "Bold and the Beautiful").
Tonight's episode really begins with Earl's announcement that before he can go to some kind of county fair only after crossing off one more bad deed from the past off his list - the time he took free beers from a hole-in-one-golfer at a country club. He finds the golfer easily enough, but in the process of trying to right previous wrongs discovers that life is a little more complicated than he'd thought while dreaming up his list. Which isn't too much of a problem - he's able to cross this item off his list, as well as a few others - but it does mean that has to keep putting off a visit to the fair that his brother Randy had been looking forward to so much. His brother has decided that he actually hasn't been helping Earl enough, so when Earl decides that his own list has become a karma-wrenching obsession in itself (beautifully realized in 'Let me off this bus!' sequence that has magic pixie dust sprinkled all over it), together they are finally able to square the cosmic circle that Earl has been so earnest in pursuing. And then they ride off together in the Trans-Am (or is it a Camaro?) from Smokey and the Bandit. After writing this I now realize that I have captured none of the greatness of this truly awesome show. Watch it next week and see for yourself.
posted by Quin Finnegan at 10:42 PM
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