I Have a TV and I Know How to Use It

I don't watch a lot of TV. This isn't because I'm tragically hip or morally pretentious. To be clear, I may be morally pretentious, but that's not why I don't watch much TV. I'm just busy.

I am aware of TV. I tend to have a sense of what other people are watching and have seen most popular shows once or at least enough of them to know their premises and frequently, why I don't like them. But I am well below the national average for hours of television watched.

I am very committed to the shows I do like, though. So that makes up for my pinko TV snobbery right? Regretably, The Simpsons no longer makes this list, it does usually benefit from its Sunday evening time slot though. I don't know what happened. Remember when it used to be thoughtful, warm, critical, funny, and observant? I guess it still can be, it's just more miss than hit, or I'm turning in to a real Comic Book Guy.

So, these are the shows I go out of my way to watch or record (on magnetic tape- not TiVo, I'm keepin' it real, South Side 4-0, G.):

Arrested Development
King of The Hill
Bernie Mac
Everybody Hates Chris

And now... My Name Is Earl and The Office
Check your local listings but I'll be watching them tonight at 9pm on NBC

My Name Is Earl is great. At first glance it seems the show might just go with the easy and often mean-spirited jokes about poor people or Jack Ass style physical abuse. But it's easy and mean-spirited jokes about poor people and Jack Ass style physical abuse with moral awareness and development. Yes!

The basic gist of it is the title character figures his life stinks because he's been a horrible person his whole life so he tries to make up for it by fixing everything he's done wrong. This makes up the plot line of the individual episodes. The larger arc of the story is he won't cash a $100,000 lottery ticket until he has earned it (he's afraid of what will happen if something good he doesn't deserve comes his way). This is his understanding of Karma. That's not Karma but the writers of the show are smart enough to treat their limited knowledge of a deep religious teaching by communicating it through Earl. Earl hears about Karma in the hospital from Carson Daly in a morphine fog. Right there the writers critique the whole celebrity pop religion phenomenon and give themselves an out for the times when they completely misrepresent its true expression like when Earl will call for "an army of Karma" to come rescue him. Brilliant.

So though religion is often incorrectly portrayed, (see Bob's recent post on the subject) My Name Is Earl knows what it doesn't know. And even better, it knows what we tend to get wrong about things like repentance, justice, revenge, selfishness and how doing right is often difficult and different from what we originally thought.

That's a simple lesson, but it is so rarely done as well or as funny as it is on My Name Is Earl.

So watch it- especially if you are a Nielsen Family. Too many of the shows I like get cancelled.

(I just got a commercial on the telephone- not a telemarketer, a recorded commercial) Weird.

In The Evening- Led Zeppelin (This is one of the worst Led Zeppelin songs ever- what's it doing in my music library?)
I Wish- Stevie Wonder
Sgt. Pepper's...- The Beatles
Kiss- Prince
Stay Away- Nirvana
You and Whose Army- Radiohead
I Must Have That Man- Billie Holiday
Sigmund & The Seamonster- Tripping Daisy