Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I’m a TV junkie, people. Or I used to be, before TV became obselete. These days I download almost everything I watch, Jonothan Ross being the single exception, and that’s only because Nikki and I have made a ritual out of setting time aside to watch it together. The problem is that I think US TV is generally getting shitter and more and more I’m having to turn towards fringe-network cartoons and imported anime to provide for my entertainment needs. I’m a junkie without the certainty of where my next fix is coming from, and this leads me blindly into watching rubbish sometimes, just because it was familiar rubbish.

With free time becoming a premium, I decided I wasn’t going to waste my precious hours watching stuff I didn’t like. I’d rather have Family Guy and Futurama DVDs entertaining me while I eat than a new episode of Joey doing its best to make me live the whole eating process in reverse. I wasted too many hours on last year’s thoroughly mediocre TV season, which saw Enterprise limp to an ending with only slight improvements, Stargate: Atlantis rehash the same tired old sci-fi staples, going so far as to rip off even its own parent show, and Joey, which is so terrible I can’t begin to describe the ways in which it sucks. And there’s always the exponential plummeting decline in the quality of the Simpsons to kick you when you’re down.

So I’ve jettisoned it all. Except maybe the Simpsons. However, I still want new stuff to watch, so I’m planning to try out a few new things now the new US TV season is gearing up, and when I do I’ll be sharing my views with the world in the needless verbose and unfocussed manner to which I am accustomed. And today is the first of those times.

This evening, I watched the first episode of “My Name is Earl.” I’ve been looking forward to this for some time because Jason lee, filthy scientologist that he is, makes for compelling viewing in just about everything he does. Mallrats almost entirely depends upon his on-screen charisma to make things work, and despite the obvious flaws in the plot, he pulls it together almost single handedly. His appearances in Almost Famous, while overshadowed by the inate credibility of those around him, would stand out head and shoulders in any other film. I’ve never seen “kissing a fool” but I’m willing to bet he pounds David “Ross” Schwimmer into the ground whenever they’re on screen together.

With that in mind, it’s fair to say I was expecting big things from Earl. Perhaps it was too much, I’m not certain just yet. I’ve seen a lot of publicity talking it up big as one of this season’s big sleeper hits, but I may have made a mistake by relying solely on newsaskew’s legendarily sycophantic take on things for that. They get the news out there like no-one else can, but someone needs to tell them it’s okay to criticise things sometimes.

So, er, that’s why I ended up watching it. And the natural question that makes me ask is, what do I think of it?

Well, it’s pretty good, I guess. It’s a comedy, but not a single-camera canned-laughter comedy like the usual American standard. The format is a lot like Spaced, actually, in how it’s got a cinematic gait with constant asides providing extra laughs. And no canned laughter, so you have to actually figure out on your own what’s supposed to be a joke.

I didn’t find it as funny as pre-release reviews seem to have suggested I might. The pacing of the episode was a little rough, but I place the blame on having to introduce and execute the initial concept in 25 minutes. Future episodes, I expect will have a little less packed into them which should give better time for a plot to breathe. I think I laughed out loud about six or seven times, and that’s how I base how funny I found something. American Dad the other day got easily twice that, where last season the very best episodes of Joey got two out of me. Lee’s acting is up to his usual standard, and the supporting characters are complementing things well. Part of the humour for the show is drawn from how everyone’s a pathetic redneck, which certainly makes a change from laughing at the twentysomething middle-classes.

The music in the episode is really great. It’s almost too great, in fact, because I was sitting there going “ooh, Jane’s Addiction. Hey, that’s Beck. Again!” instead of concentrating on the action. It’s probably a cheap attempt at making it seem a little cooler than it is, shoving in a bunch of MTV’s most popular, but then it’s also a nice change from the cheap ass music cues it could’ve been stuck with. One of my other favourite ever programmes, Daria, was utterly packed with indie & rock classics, so I don’t expect it’ll prove too problematic in the long run.
Conceptually, Earl’s plot as established lends itself to an extremely formulaic structure. I despise programs that stick to a formula in a rigid fashion (Sliders and Quantum Leap screwed me up on that concept for life) so how much I keep enjoying Earl in the long run will partially depend on what they do with the formula and how much they play with it. Right now, it’s only developed so far as establishing the basic rules, so I expect it’ll stick to them for quite a while yet. It’s not a particularly bad formula, of course, it’s just that any formula is instantly worse than freeform episode-specific narrative.

Anyway, not a bad start, all things considered. It’s got me back for now, which would probably delight the people making it, if only I contributed to their advertising viewer base as well. The best programmes are those that improve once the ground rules are established and the writing has found its feet - Futurama improves dramatically after its first 6 episodes - and the worst programmes are those that exhaust their best jokes after roughly the same amount of time - Amazing to remember that I actually thought Joey’s first two episodes were a little better than Friends was when it finished. The big question will be which direction Earl goes.