Spoilers for "My Name Is Earl" coming up just as soon as I get the number of Eddie Steeples' personal trainer...The original "Our 'Cops' Is On" was easily my favorite "Earl" episode ever, 30 minutes of anarchic gags and unfettered Bad Earl. The sequel, unfortunately, was twice as long and maybe half as good.
There were a number of funny gags -- my favorites were the infra-red erections and everyone rushing to get their hands off the hooker after she started talking about keeping babies -- but a lot of the hour was either placed on the backs of less-funny recurring characters (the cops) or seemed too concerned with digs at post-9/11 patriotism and paranoia, and with "Earl" continuity jokes. (And speaking of which, how did Nescobar-A-Lop-Lop speak English so well before he took Earl's remedial English class? I know he's always been fluent in Mandarin, but I thought English was new to him.)
Unlike those hour-long "Office" episodes, this one had different writers for each half -- Tim Stack (author of the original "Cops" parody) for the first, Vali Chandrasekaran for the second -- and the non-Stack half was the funnier of the two. When the original "Cops" episode aired, I wrote that it felt like the writers had been saving up all these jokes about pre-karma Camden County for just such an occasion. At the very least, it seems that Stack was, though his on-camera appearances remain hilarious.
One of the better "Earl"s of this season, but like most sequels to the classics, it was bound to come up short of the original.
What did everybody else think?
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