Carson Daly, the evening's guest moderator, with star of My Name is Earl, Jason Lee.

My Name is Earl stars Ethan Suplee, Jason Lee, Television Academy 2nd Vice Chair Karen Miller, Earl's Jamie Pressly and Television Academy CFO Frank Kohler.

My Name is Earl castmembers Jaime Pressly, Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee, Nadine Velazquez and Eddie Steeples head into Goldenson Theatre. Photos: Mathew Imaging

Karma is King at Evening with Earl
An Evening with My Name is Earl
Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre
February 23, 2005

By Libby Slate

When the executive producers of My Name is Earl were deciding what the comedy’s title character should look like, they knew they wanted him to have facial hair.

“Trust me,” said Jason Lee, newly cast as Earl, “I look funny in a moustache.”

That moustache proved to be the greatest source of disagreement between Earl creator/executive producer Greg Garcia and executive producer/director Marc Buckland on the one hand and NBC on the other, Garcia and Buckland recalled during the Television Academy’s lively, “Evening with My Name is Earl.”

For a complete transcript of the program, held February 23, 2006, at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre, click here to download a PDF copy.

Panelists included cast members Jason Lee, Jaime Pressly, Nadine Velazquez, Ethan Suplee and Eddie Steeles and producer/unit production manager Henry Lange. Carson Daly, who appeared in the pilot, moderated.

The network wanted Earl clean-shaven, so in a negotiating ploy that worked, the producers first sent horrified executives photos of their star in a goatee, then a Fu Manchu-style moustache.

Finally, six hours before the 6:00 a.m. start on their first day of shooting, Garcia received a text message from NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly: “Fine. He can have the mustache, but cut the hair some.”

And then, Garcia confessed gleefully—and, on this Academy evening, for the first time ever—“We showed up on set, and I said to Jason, ‘They want us to cut the hair.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t want to cut the hair. I like it the way it is.’ And somebody from the network is there, and is like, ‘Did you cut the hair?’ ‘We’re going to cut it.’"

"Jason and I went over to the makeup trailer and sat for ten minutes,” Garcia continued. When they came out and the network asked again if they’d cut it, he replied, as he pushed Lee toward the set,  “Yeah, yeah, we took off an inch and a half.” Roll camera…

Chances are NBC won’t be too disturbed to learn of Garcia’s chicanery: My Name is Earl is the season’s top-rated new comedy, and has already received People’s Choice and Directors Guild Awards and Writers Guild nominations. Garcia got the idea for the quirky show, about a man who has an epiphany and tries to attain good karma by righting the wrongs of his past, while on vacation with his family.

“I decided I was just going to try to think of a new show that week,” he recalled. “I love the world of trailer parks. I believe in karma. I like the idea of somebody starting a new adventure late in their lives. And at the end of the week, I had this idea.”

Earl executive producer/director Marc Buckland with host Carson Daly on Goldenson Theatre's big screen, with cast and production team panelists onstage.

Panelists Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee, Nadine Velazquez

Lee was cast first, without an audition, after a meeting to discuss the show. He liked the fact that it was “out of the box,” he said.

Pressly, fearful of being pigeonholed for playing Southern “white trash,” at first resisted a reading, but immediately relented when she heard Lee was on board.

“[Joy] is the most colorful character I’ve ever played,” she said. “She’s the most fun character.”

Steeples also hesitated initially. “[My agent] said there was this part for a character called Darnell, a.k.a. ‘Crabman,’” he remembered with a laugh.

“I thought, okay, I just got through doing something where I’m called ‘Rubber Band Man’”—in a series of popular commercials for OfficeMax—“and now they want me to be ‘Crabman.’ I felt like I was going down.”

Suplee was cast after Garcia heard commentary on the DVD of the film Without a Paddle about his unconventional approach to a scene, and took a look. Velazquez’s character was initially supposed to be Russian, until she auditioned for the role.

There have been some big names in the guest cast, among them Beau Bridges, Juliette Lewis, Giovanni Ribisi and Brett Butler. The list of Earl’s transgressions that they enact is often inspired by the writers’ own misdeeds, Garcia noted; one writer, for instance, shot a woman in the neck with a BB gun.

Why has the show become such a hit?

“Everybody likes to root for the underdog,” Pressly said. Garcia recalled observing the show’s testing process. “I was watching the dials go up as people were watching the pilot,” he said. “And they were laughing, and they were getting the jokes and enjoying it, and it was doing well.

“But then Jason pulled out his list and started talking about what he was going to do and how he was going to change his life. And the dials started really going up. And it wasn’t anything funny about it. It was just what the series was about. And at that moment, I thought, ‘All right, people get it. They’re tapped into the series. They’re going to root for this guy. They want to see him turn his life around.’ And I think that’s kind of a universal thing.”

Karen Miller is chairman of the activities committee. Robert O’Donnell is director of activities for the Academy.

Click here to download a PDF transcript of the entire "Evening with My Name Is Earl" program.

Television Academy 2nd Vice Chair Karen Miller with peer group governors Ray Colcord, Music, and Brian Seth Hurst, Interactive Media.	Jason Lee and other Earl castmembers took time to sign autographs for fans.

(l. to r.) Jaime Pressly, Ethan Suplee, Greg Garcia, creator/executive producer, Jason Lee, Nadine Velazquez, Henry Lange, producer/unit production manager, Marc Buckland, executive producer/director and Eddie Steeples

Photos: Mathew Imaging