My Name is Earl returns for another season this fall. While season 2 ended with a cliffhanger of sorts, series creator Greg Garcia hints on some details that will hopefully satisfy the curiosity of its anxious fans.
Earl, played by Jason Lee, takes the fall for ex-wife Joy, played by Jaime Pressly, and so ends up in the slammer as the new season begins.
Read on to find out what’s in store for season 3.
“He’ll be in prison for a while,” Garcia revealed. “We didn’t want to come back in season 3 and just go, ‘Oh, he’s out of prison. There was a technicality.’ When we decided to do it, we knew we were going to do it. We’re very fortunate that Earl has a past where he knows a lot of people in prison. So there are people on his list that are in prison. It’s actually fortunate for him to be there for a little while.”
“We tell stories in a way that we have a lot of flashback episodes so that it’s easy for us to get out of prison for a while just the way we tell stories. We’re doing another Cops episode this year, an hour-long Cops episode. So we have a lot of ways to get out of there,” he added.
Although Earl’s list remains to be a principle element of the series, Garcia intends to add in a few twists and turns to avoid a lackluster show.
“I could say we wanted more flexibility. In the first season we really felt that we had a premise that we wanted to set up and really stick to the list, and we tried to find as many ways to tell that story differently as we could. We felt like we did a good job of going to season two. So that’s the first one we decided, ‘Okay, we’re going to really tell some stories that take place over the whole season.’ I think it’s like wanting to keep it fresh every year. That’s why we put him in prison at the end of the year and that’s why he’s going to be in prison this year. We’re always going to have the list. We’re always going to have that to go to. We’re always just doing stories that just have to do with a list but it’s fun to have other things to go with,” he explained.
According to Garcia, Earl ending up in prison is also a strategy for allowing the character to gradually grow.
“We were always worried about him changing too fast, the character, and so we tried to spoon it out a little at a time. But knowing where we were going to end last season with him going to prison, we weren’t afraid to go ahead and start giving him a lot of things that he wanted in life, and we did a little arc of three or four at the end where he actually started getting his life together. The whole time, we knew we were going to take it all away from him and send him to prison, so that was kind of by design,” he said.
As for other season 3 updates, My Name is Earl has also added a new recurring character in the form of Michael Rapaport, popularly known for his role on The War at Home. The 37-year-old actor will be gracing the series as an inmate in the jail where Earl is serving time.
My Name is Earl season 3 premieres on Thursday, September 27 on NBC.
-Kris De Leon, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: CanMag.com
(Image courtesy of NBC)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
