Good Finish, Earl.

Last night's season finale of "My Name Is Earl" was excellent. The show

Stan Brown...

According to Excite TV, last night's was a rerun.

was characteristically funny, but really outdid itself for heartwarming
story-telling. The story of how Earl made up with his dad was very
moving, and the sort of thing that every guy should be able to relate
to. And for women was the story of how Joy related to her children.

SoHillsGuy...

A solid episode, true, but it wasn't the season finale. The season
finale was a couple of weeks ago.

Major ChrisB...

thank god, I download all my favourite shows and keep them on my hard drive
and then burn them to dvd-r after the season finale. I think I've had about
6 wasted disks I've had to reburn and chuck out after they've snuck in a
season finale. House seemed like it had had it's finale and then threw out
another episode, CSI miami had a nice cliffhanger only for me to discover
there was another episode....and a couple of other shows have done the same
thing, I thought it was the finale....but no...theres another episode the
following week.

Plus tv.com wasn't working from my computer for a couple of weeks so I
couldn't check....

Sounds like what you saw was a repeat of "Dad's Car" from March.

karl...

Yup and yup. It was a good episode though not the finale. Those two 'punks'
in middle age racing a decrepit Mustang against the el Camino were
hilarious.

A few years back, I was disappointed that "The Lone Gunmen" flopped,
because that was also a very heartwarming show. But with the over-
supply of snide comedy, like "The Drew Carey Show" and "That '70's
Show," Earl has show that it's possible to write good comedy without
being harsh.

In fact, the amount of niceness in a show is really irrelevant to it's
success. All you need are interesting characters, stories worth telling
and wacky situations. Everything else falls under the rubricks of
"theme," "mood" and "format," all of which are effectively
interchangeable within the deeper infrastructure of excellent writing.

The one thing you've gotta ask yourself is, with such sweet parents and
such a stable family, how did Earl ever go bad in the first place? The
answer to that question may generate another story worth writing.