Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council WARNING: Graphic Content!!! Do NOT push play if you don't want to see the explicit video!!!

My Name is Earl on NBC

If anything good came of the recently-ended TV writer’s strike, it was the fact that homes across America were safe from new episodes of My Name is Earl.  This once-heartwarming show has lost its way, and has returned to  prime time with crude humor, offensive sexual content, and vile language.  The April 3^rd episode, which aired at the top of the Family Hour at 8:00 p.m. ET, was an hour-long landslide of adult “comedy.” It richly deserves the title Worst of the Week.

The show picks up from where it had left off before the writer’s strike.  Earl has just been hit by a car and lies comatose in the street.  Earl’s friends rush to the scene and try to revive him.  Joy attempts to use a sexual technique which, she says, she used to use on Earl to wake him up during sex.  Joy straddles Earl on the gurney and twists his nipples.  In a transportation debacle Earl gets lost and winds up in the home of a sex-crazed female trucker.  His friends find him in the trucker’s house and through a window witness the woman molesting Earl in his unconscious state.  The woman kisses Earl and puts his hand on her breast. 

Once Earl arrives at the hospital, doctors tell the group that Earl is in a coma and that they do not know when he will revive.  At this point, the program’s writers spit in the face of traditional family values by taking the viewer inside Earl’s thoughts, where he is dreaming of being a character on a classic family sitcom.  However, this is a modern NBC version staring Paris Hilton.  Earl and his sitcom family frequently use sexual innuendo and foul language.  In one particularly troubling scene Earl leaves for work and says goodbye to his wife, not by a kiss on the cheek or a hug, but by squeezing her breasts.  Lest any viewer miss the point, Pairs Hilton reminds us that “that’s hot!”

Back in the real world, Earl’s friends attempt to revive Earl. Joy, in front of her current husband, decides that the best way to wake Earl is to take his hand and put it under her shirt onto her bare breast.  Her husband doesn’t mind, saying that anything above the waist is not cheating.

In three different scenes we see Earl’s hand on different women’s breasts.  Is this really appropriate for parents and their children during the Family Hour?  If NBC is serious about its recent promise to air family-friendly programming during the 8:00 p.m. hour, the network should remove My Name Is Earl from the early evening as soon as possible.

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