Like most of you out there, as an American growing up in the 80’s and 90’s,, I’ve watched a lot of television, man. Most of it rolls off the . But there’s one show I keep coming back to – like a rug I can’t stop looking at – and it’s a half hour about a small-time crook from Camden County with a mustache you could hang a coat on who’s trying to repent for the sins of his past.
He’s just trying to abide.
My Name Is Earl is my favorite sitcom. I’m not 100% sure if it’s the funniest one ever made. It may not be the cleverest (though I would argue for this). But it’s the only one I can think of that a person can watch and maybe find a little something of themselves in, and it made me laugh to beat the band.
Parts, anyway..
The premise is a Dudeist parable and nobody said so out loud
ThisEarl fella scratches a lottery ticket. Hundred grand, right there in his hand. Immediately gets clipped by a car, loses the ticket to the wind, and wakes up in a hospital bed watching a show, and there’s Carson Daly all gussied up and talking about karma.
And here’s the part that matters. Earl doesn’t rage. He doesn’t sue anybody. He doesn’t spend nine episodes screaming at the sky about how unfair it is. He looks at the situation and goes, huh, maybe the universe was trying to tell me something.
That’s it. That’s the whole point of the show. The world knocked him over and instead of fighting it he asked why it would have done that in the first place. He asked what he could have done differently.
Earl was a Dude
Look at what the guy actually does over the course of four seasons. He makes a list about all the bad things he has done to others throughout his life. Things that would have brought about this bad karma. Then he works the list, one item at a time, in no particular hurry, with no strategic plan and no five-year vision and no productivity system.
He doesn’t avoid the list (well, maybe a couple, but who can blame the Dude). He doesn’t lament about the list. He doesn’t wake up at 4 a.m. to attack the list with a cold shower and a mission statement. He just does the next thing on it, and when the next thing turns into a three-day disaster involving a stolen mailbox and a woman named Dolores, he rolls with that too.
Earl has almost no ego about the work in front of him – or the good deeds he has behind him. He apologizes to people who don’t deserve his time. He gets robbed, arrested, dumped, and shrugged at, and mostly he just keeps going, because getting worked up about it wouldn’t cross anything off. He owns one mustache and one attitude and has never once tried to improve either.
That’s Wu Wei with a cigarette in it. Effortless action, Camden County edition.
And notice he never gets self-righteous about it. A lesser show would have made Earl smug, some redemption-arc guy lecturing everybody at the Crab Shack about his journey. Earl never does that. He’s just a guy trying to be less of a jerk than he used to be, which, honestly, is the only self-improvement plan that’s ever worked for anybody.
And speaking of the Crab Shack….
Crabman was arguably a bigger Dude
Now let’s talk about Darnell.
Crabman is the most unbothered man in the history of network television. His wife is a hurricane. His neighborhood is a felony. His bar is full of people making the worst decisions available to them at any given moment. And Darnell just stands there behind the counter with a towel over his shoulder, calm as a pond, shucking crabs and taking care of his turtle.
The man is in witness protection with a whole other identity buried under the apron, and he still can’t be rattled. He loves Joy exactly as she is, which if you’ve seen the show, that in an of itself is a spiritual accomplishment on par with anything Lao Tzu pulled off. He raises kids that aren’t biologically his without ever making it a thing. He’s kind to people who have not earned it.
Earl is the guy doing the work. Darnell is the guy who already arrived and had the decency not to mention it.
If the Dude has a spirit animal on this show, it’s Crabman and it isn’t close.
What you can actually take from this
Three things, and none of them require a journal.
Make the list short and start at the top.
Earl’s whole system is that the list exists and he’s on item one. Not item forty. Not the full inventory of everything wrong with him since 1987. Item one. The rest of the list can sit there being a list.
Let the universe be right about you sometimes.
Not everything that knocks you sideways is an injustice. Sometimes it’s information. Earl got hit by a car and treated it like a human paraquat. You don’t have to believe in cosmic bookkeeping to notice that the guy who asks “what’s this telling me” ends up in better shape than the guy who asks “why me.”
Be Crabman when you can.
Steady, warm, unhurried, and completely unbothered by the fact that your life is objectively insane. You don’t have to fix the chaos around you. You just have to not add to it.
That’s the whole durned philosophy. It’s not deep. Most true things aren’t.
Now let’s talk about NBC
Four seasons. Then it ends on a cliffhanger, and NBC pulls the plug.
Not a finale. A cliffhanger. They let a show about a guy finishing his list get canceled in the middle of the list. There’s a joke in there somewhere and I don’t think anybody at the network was in on it.
I’m supposed to be the mellow guy here. I’m supposed to say strikes and gutters, man, ups and downs. And I will, in a second. But first let the record show that canceling My Name Is Earl before Earl got to finish was an asshole move by a bunch of assholes, and I have made my peace with it in the same way you make peace with a guy who peed on your rug. Which is to say: I’ve moved on, but I remember.
Okay. Deep breath.
Here’s the mellow part, and I mean this. The show doesn’t need the ending. Earl’s list was never going to be finished anyway, because nobody’s list is ever finished. That’s not a bug in the premise, that’s the point of the premise. You work your list until you stop, and then somebody else works theirs (which rumor has it that is where the next season was going). Cancellation is just the universe doing to a TV show exactly what the show spent four years saying the universe does to everybody.
Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.
The show abides. Somewhere in syndication, Earl is still crossing something off, Randy is still breathing through his mouth, and Crabman is still behind that counter, not worried about any of it.
Take it easy, man.
Before you go
Got something on your own list you’re not sure how to handle? Ask the Dude. He’s got opinions, and they’re mostly about relaxing.
And if you want to wear the philosophy instead of just reading about it, the shop’s over here.
A parody and fan project inspired by Dudeism. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the rights holders of “The Big Lebowski,” “My Name Is Earl,” or anybody else mentioned here. The Dude is a state of mind, man.