My Name Is Earl: Season One
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

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After winning and instantly losing $100,000 in the lottery, ineffectual crook Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) hears TV personality Carson Daly prattling about karma. Inspired by the concept, Earl makes it his new purpose to "do good things" in his own white trash spin on Pay It Forward. With his new lease on life, Earl miraculously reclaims his lottery money and, using a flophouse motel room as home base, attends to his long list of misdeeds.

With the assistance of his simpleminded, tagalong brother Randy (Ethan Suplee) -- and despite the resistance of his trailer trash ex-wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) -- Earl tries to right past wrongs as benign as stealing beer from a golfer or as devastating as costing his father the Camden County mayoral election. Mustachioed Lee is the epoxy that holds this manic ensemble together, but the standout is peroxide-tongued Joy, who gets some of the loudest, if not the best, one-liners, as when she tarts up for a date and barks to her children, "Boys, get Momma's plastic stripper shoes out of your Lego box!" Forget Blue Collar TV; My Name Is Earl is the gold standard for redneck comedy.

The must-see of this four-DVD set is a 15-minute bonus episode titled "Bad Karma." This exclusive-to-DVD bizarro Earl episode finds Hickey and Co. taking their marching orders from TV's enfant terrible Stewie Griffin instead of Carson Daly. So instead of doing good deeds, Earl exacts revenge on those who done him wrong. A bonus 20-minute blooper reel is your standard montage of crack-ups and flubbed lines.

And in the 40-minute "Making Things Right: Behind the Scenes of My Name Is Earl" featurette, series creator Greg Garcia -- driving around the Valley in his T-top Trans-Am and sporting his signature cowboy hat -- reveals that the inspiration for the show is his real-life father. For a modest show with such integrity, the mobile interview comes across as more than a little affected. Is it a ploy to show off Garcia's Smokey and the Bandit muscle car or is he really just too busy to do his interview on the set like the rest of the cast and crew? Anyway, the 24 original episodes and the "Bad Karma" one-off make this a must-have disc for fans of the show.

by Rob. Walton