The Big Picture

• My Name Is Earl follows the story of a small-time criminal who wins $100,000 in the lottery and decides to right the wrongs from his past.
• The show featured a wide range of characters, including Earl's dim-witted brother, his love interest, and his conniving ex-wife.
• The show was abruptly canceled after the fourth season, leaving fans frustrated and without closure for the planned series finale.

My Name Is Earl first hit our screens on September 20, 2005, and became a popular staple of '00s television. The show starred Jason Lee in his first lead role on TV. Earl Hickey is introduced as a small-time criminal with a long history of betraying and disappointing the people in his life. When he wins $100,000 on a scratch card, he thinks his life is about to change, but karma intervenes, and he is hit by a car, losing the winning ticket in the process. In the hospital, he learns about karma and decides to write a list of all the wrongs he needs to right for his life to get better. When he proves to the universe that he is serious about helping those he wronged in his past, the lottery ticket lands at his feet, ready to fund his karmic adventures.

Each episode typically features a new character of the week with whom Earl reconnects in order to redeem himself and cross them off his list. The series was created by Greg Garcia and ran consistently between September and May for four consecutive years of roughly 20 episodes each. However, Earl never got to finish his list as the show was canceled abruptly after a cliffhanger ending to the Season 4 finale. What makes the situation even more frustrating to fans is that Garcia had the perfect series finale in mind that they never got the chance to shoot.

My Name Is Earl

A ne'er do well wins $100,000 in the lottery and decides to right all the wrongs from his past with his newfound realization!

We Almost Got Another Season of 'My Name Is Earl'

Other notable characters in the comedy include Earl's brother Randy (played by Ethan Suplee) a dim-witted man with a heart of gold. Nadine Velazquez plays Catalina, a housekeeping maid at the motel where the brothers live, who soon becomes Randy's love interest. Earl's ex-wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) is introduced in the pilot's opening montage, as equally conniving as Earl used to be, pressuring him to raise her son Dodge whose real father left. Soon after, she gives birth to Earl Jr. who is revealed to actually be the son of Darnell AKA Crab Man (Eddie Steeples).

The show's plot becomes somewhat more absurd as the series goes on, with Crab Man revealed to be a former government assassin in the witness protection program. With his cover blown, he and his father (who is also revealed to be a government assassin) undergo a mission to set things right again. With life back to the normalcy the show started with, Season 4 ended with DNA test results revealing that Earl is in fact Dodge's biological father. In a one-two punch, Crab Man is revealed not to be Earl Jr.'s father as the pilot had established. The title card read "To be continued," but it never was. Greg Garcia took part in a Reddit AMA ten years ago to explain where that storyline might have gone. "Earl Jr’s Dad was going to be someone famous. Like Dave Chappelle or Lil John. Someone that came to town on tour and Joy slept with. But when we got canceled, we never got the chance to figure it out. I was worried about doing a cliffhanger but I asked NBC if it was safe to do one at the end of the season, and they told me it was. I guess it wasn’t."

Randy's actor Ethan Suplee took to the Slick & Thick Podcast to elaborate. "My Name Is Earl was picked up for another season. [...] We were a hit. And the [NBC] network called and said, 'We want to license the show for another year.' And the [Fox] studio said, 'Well, we want more money. We want to renegotiate our deal with you.' And the network basically did not respond for two weeks. And then the studio called back and said, 'We'll take your deal,' and the network said, 'Too late.'"

‘My Name Is Earl’ Cast Guide (and What They’re Doing Now)

#88 - Spent way too much time without praising 'My Name Is Earl'

What Would the Planned Finale Have Been Like?

"It was really devastating," Jason Lee told The Nine Club with Chris Roberts Podcast. "There's probably not four days that goes by without somebody messaging me on Instagram, 'What happened to Earl?' Or some people thinking it's my fault like, 'Dude, you left us stranded. What the hell?' I'm like... I'm not NBC, I didn't cancel the show, man. It was out of my hands. But Greg Garcia, the creator of the show, he's still my friend. What he did with that show is incredible. He showed up on set one day and said, 'Hey, I have bad news guys. It looks like we're getting canceled. So like a, you know, clean-out-your-lockers kind of vibe. We're out of here."

In the Reddit AMA, Garcia continued to reveal that the show's true finale had in fact been planned, making the disappointment of what happened all the more frustrating. "I had always had an ending to Earl, and I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to see it happen. You’ve got a show about a guy with a list, so not seeing him finish it is a bummer. But the truth is, he wasn’t ever going to finish the list." This is consistent with the show's set-up from as early as the first season. In Season 1's "Stole Beer From a Golfer," Earl recognizes that by focusing on his list, he's been taking Randy's help for granted, so adds "Neglected Randy" to his list. He even says in his voice-over that he never plans on crossing it off, intending to continuously prioritize his brother more in his day-to-day.

Garcia said the finale would begin with Earl getting stuck on a really hard list item, frustrated that he would never finish crossing everything off his list. "Somebody shows up at our motel door," added Suplee recently, "finds us at the bar, and starts to make amends to Earl for something." Earl would then question where the man got such an idea and "goes back and finds all these people who have lists, who are out there trying to do good, and it all comes back to him. He was the beginning of this." Garcia concluded, "Earl eventually realizes that his list started a chain reaction of people with lists and that he’s finally put more good into the world than bad. So, at that point, he was going to tear up his list and go live his life. Walk into the sunset a free man. With good karma." In Suplee's own words of longing, "That would have been an awesome, awesome episode."

'Raising Hope' Gave Fans a Pseudo-Finale

In 2010, Garcia returned to the world of TV sitcoms with Raising Hope, a show with a very similar tone to My Name Is Earl. The series follows Jimmy Chance (Lucas Neff) who sleeps with a strange woman in a one-night-stand only to discover that she's a serial killer. After giving birth in custody, she is sentenced to death and 23-year-old Jimmy is forced to raise his daughter, Hope, with the help of his dysfunctional low-income family. The series ran for four twenty-plus episode seasons, exactly as Earl had, and on March 10, 2014, Fox announced its cancelation. Although fans of Garcia's work were never truly given closure for My Name Is Earl, the showrunner did his best toprovide whatever closure he could in the form of veiled references made within Raising Hope.

As early as the pilot, Raising Hope makes a reference to its predecessor with a TV newscaster mentioning that "a small-time crook with a long list of wrongs he was making amends for has finally finished, and you'll never guess how it ended." The late-great Cloris Leachman played Jimmy's Maw Maw whose nursing home was named Earl J. Hickey Memorial Nursing Home. The references are too many to list, and deserve an article in their own right, but the most notable reference is that Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee, Nadine Velazquez, Jaime Pressly, and Eddie Steeples all make appearances in the show as new characters.

The episode "Making the Band" serves as a sort of reunion for much of the cast, and the episode "Yo Zappa do: part 2" sees all five of the main cast return. The latter features a scene in which NBC Producer Graham Clarke is kicked in the crotch and told "that's for canceling My Name Is Earl!" The episode also reveals that Eddie Steeples' character Smokey Floyd is involved in the witness protection program, making his true identity as Crab Man a possibility. It even ends with Jason Lee's narration, a fitting call back to the show that started it all and a true homage to My Name Is Earl.

My Name Is Earl is currently streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

Watch on Hulu

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