List of My Name Is Earl characters

The list of My Name Is Earl characters is from the NBC fictional comedy television series.

Earl Jehosephat Hickey (played by Jason Lee) — The titular and viewpoint character, he has a long history of petty crimes and other repugnant acts such as bullying classmates and taking advantage of others. In the opening episode, he wins a lottery scratcher but is immediately hit by a car; during his recovery where he watches a Carson Daly interview where the latter talks about karma, he realizes he has been a bad person and tries to turn his life around by making a list of all the bad things he has done and doing the good deeds to cross them off the list. Although he lacks much formal education, Earl is intelligent and shows good judgement to the metaphysical and has come under the guidance of a strong moral compass provided to him by the unseen hand of karma which has made his life miserable. His conversion to following the dictates of Karma as against his own instinctual misbehavior now drives his life, as he seeks to survive by making up for his past wrongs with a self-created program of damage repair that loosely tracks some of the methods of formal 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. The linkage between Earl's path and such programs is made plain by the show's title itself, which incorporates the traditional first-name only introduction by attendees at meetings (such as "My name is Earl"). Along the way, Earl often finds that his initial misdeeds have long and enduring tentacles that produce massive negative secondary side effects, but that his patchwork fixes likewise produce substantially deeper and truer benefits to initial victims than could have been imagined or engineered. Earl fears flying, needles and possible attacks from alligators in the sewer when he uses the toilet, owns a 1973 red El Camino that once belonged to his friend Frank: it has a blue driver's side door, found in a tornado. Earl was married to Joy as the series begins, and was subsequently divorced from her (he signed the papers under the influence of morphine) and married and divorced from two other women during the time line of the show, with each marriage being to a woman he barely knew at the time of their vows. Earl's father intended to name him Carl (after himself), but his cursive letter 'C' was read as an 'E' by the hospital where Earl was born. In many flashbacks, he is seen wearing an AC/DC, Metallica or Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt, often under the unbuttoned flannel shirt that is his trademark. He also appears to be incapable of keeping his eyes open when photographs are taken. Earl moved out of his parents' house on March 14, 1989 (which his father was so thrilled about that he made 3.14.89 the combination to his gun case). One episode says that Earl is allergic to cats, but the allergy is later given to Randy instead. Earl was sent to Nathanville State Penitentiary as inmate #28301-016 at the start of Season 3 for a crime Joy committed that would have been her third strike. Rather than allow her to go to prison for life and break up her family, Earl accepted the blame and rationalized his sentence as his karmic penalty for other crimes he committed that were never solved.

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