My Name Is Earl creator Greg Garcia

It evens out.

Why is that?

Yeah. I didn’t even know that until about five minutes ago. But I just looked at the website and it certainly looks like a party I’d like to go to. So I don’t have a problem with it. Our show’s writer’s assistant, Sara [Huffman], was like, “Oh my god. Yeah. That website is very cool.”

We started our first episode on Monday. We’ve been writing scripts and stuff for a couple months and trying to get a head start on that stuff.

Yeah. This week and next week we’re shooting the first and the third episode. Unlike last year there are some surprises along the way story-wise because before our stories would all start and finish in one episode. So you wouldn’t really miss too much if you missed an episode or two. This year a lot of the Earl stories are still going to resolve themselves in one episode as he crosses things off the list, but we’re also going to have a lot of serialized B stories with Jaime Presley, Nadine [Velazquez], Ethan [Suplee], who are the people around Earl. There’s going to be some pretty big things happening in their lives that we’re tracking from the beginning to the end of the season. So it’s a little different from last year where we just had a bunch of different ideas for episodes. This year we know where we’re starting and ending with all the characters throughout the season.

Yeah that’s part of it. Last year I really wanted to focus on the list and sink our teeth into that. We found a lot of different and cool ways to tell that story, which I was happy about. We’re certainly not going to shy away from the list at this point, but I stepped back and I could see that people could miss an episode and I’d like people not to want to miss an episode. Also we’ve got all these other great characters besides Jason, so let’s have fun with them and go into their lives a little bit more too.

No new permanent cast members, but we add new side characters all the time, which is fun. We’ve been compared a little bit in that sense to The Simpsons where we keep populating this town. We keep discovering new people and we try to bring back our favorites like Patty the daytime hooker and whatnot. We’ve got Giovanni Ribisi coming back to do an episode this year, so we're excited about that.

I directed the season finale last year, which I had never done before. I don’t know if I’m going to direct again. I was directing but I had our other executive producers, like Marc Buckland who directs a lot of our episodes, sitting right next to me the whole time. You know those driving schools where the instructor has their own steering wheel? So if you pull hard into traffic, they can just calmly steer the wheel back to the right but to everyone on the road it looks like you’re driving. That was me directing. He was just making sure I didn’t screw up. I don’t know if I’m going to do it again or not. It’s a lot of work. I also compared it to owning your own baseball team. You can put yourself in as pitcher if you really want to, but at a certain point you think, “I should have just got a pitcher for this.”

Not so much. Around here we’re always terrified we’re not going to do a good show so I don’t think I could put anymore pressure on myself.

Yeah.

I did with Alan Kirschenbaum who I co-created it with. Then I wrote My Name is Earl while I was on Yes, Dear.

It was pretty wild because I wrote Earl because I had the idea for it so I didn’t write it for a particular network or anything like that. Then it was a year and half before anybody decided to do it. But it was very different because I had never done that before. The closest I had done to single camera was when I worked on Family Guy, which was animation so it had a different way of looking at the world than a regular sitcom. But the biggest adjustment for me was when we started to figure out what the second episode was, because I found myself writing stories that would lend themselves more to be a four camera show than a single camera show. I really had to go back and read the pilot a couple times and say, “All right. What did I do here? How did I tell this story?” Because I didn’t pay much attention to how I did it when I wrote it, but the whole process is different. There’s certain things you miss about four camera because first of all the hours are a lot better, but also you get that live audience in there so you get the instant gratification of a joke working or not. But with a single camera show there are all kinds of subtle and fun camera things you can do that you can’t do in four camera.

I guess everybody would like to have something in there. Part of it has to do with not writing it for a particular network. When I pitched Yes, Dear, I could’ve written a very off the wall, single camera, domestic comedy about raising kids. But I pitched it to CBS and CBS has Monday night comedies that look a certain way and the job is to get the show to survive on the network that you’re putting it on. If he was writing The Shield for NBC or ABC, he wouldn’t have come up with that or it would’ve never got on the air. So I think by taking some of the restraints off as a writer, you are free to just go ahead and just go nuts. I think if you go into any writers’ room, I don’t care if it’s Full House or Lucky Louie, the writers all pitch things that are crazy, weird and filthy. The only difference is if you’re on Full House, you laugh and go, “Okay. Seriously. What can we do?” If you’re on Lucky Louie then those kinds of things will fly.

Yeah, we have a discussion every week. I get notes every week from the standards and practices people. There have been a few things that we haven’t been able to put in. I usually don’t fight too hard and they’re pretty good about it. My rule is that since the TV rating is TV-14, I take that to heart and I assume that parents won’t let their kids under 14 watch the show. So if we do something racy, I try to at least word it in a way that if a younger kid were to watch it, it would go over their head but an adult would catch it. There have been a few things I’ve fought for. There was one line which is one of my favorite jokes in the script where this guy had broken up with his girlfriend and he wanted to know if she had had sex with another guy since they had been broken up. She goes, “Well I used my hand on a guy a little.” They didn’t want us to say that, but it turned out that was a favorite line of somebody at the network as well. So they fought for it and it got on. I was thrilled.

He’s not allowed to shave it until hiatus. We did a little video of him shaving at the end of last season. Then he grows this big, giant, burly beard that looks like a lumberjack. He came in the other day looking like a lumberjack. Then he shaved it off and gets back to that mustache. But it was weird man. When he shaved that mustache off and was walking around set, he looks like a completely different person. That’s great for him because when he goes out with the moustache, people yell “Earl” at him. Now he can disguise himself a little bit. But it was weird. After spending like 17 months with somebody and then you stand next to him without the moustache, you feel like he’s a different person.

No, this one just popped out of my head. I’ve always liked shows that are about people having a reawakening thing in the middle of their lives. I’ve always believed in karma and I’ve always loved the trailer park motif. Once in awhile we’ll try to bring a story about something bad that I’ve done and cross it off the list. Sometimes writers will pitch horrible things they’ve done to people and we try to use that in there, but really it just came out of thin air.

It is weird. I’d like to have better ratings. I’m glad that we’re getting the ratings we are, but I certainly would like to be a much more dominant force. Hopefully the momentum of the show builds. If it stays at this number, then that’s fine, but it is weird because Yes, Dear was never considered a huge hit by the press. I’m pretty sure we got better ratings on that than we do on Earl. I guess a lot of times your definition of being a hit is possibly the network you’re on and how they’re doing currently.

I don’t know. A talent contest maybe. Simon Cowell. You can’t think about those things too much. You just hope that momentum will get you to that place. A show like Desperate Housewives comes out very strong right out of the box. Then you have other shows like Seinfeld that started off a lot slower than we’ve started off and built to this huge thing. The first three years of Everybody Loves Raymond started very slow. I look at it as if we’ve got a huge headstart. Hopefully we just keep building.

We use a lot of great music on the show. We’ve been really lucky that the network and studio give us a really nice music budget because after the pilot, they realized that music was an important part of the show. We’ve got these great people who find these great tunes so we thought it seems right to do a soundtrack. But we wanted to put some original stuff on there so instead of trying to look into the future of songs we might use, we did some cover versions of songs that we’ve used before. We had the song The Weight in the episode, so then we had Uncle Kracker do a version of that. Jon Hiatt did a version of Instant Karma. Matthew Sweet did Livin’ Thing. We were fans of those artists and we went out to them and gave them a list of songs we’ve used before and said, “What would you like to cover?” Those were the ones they picked and they came out pretty good.

It’s huge. We’ve got this montage at the end of this episode we’re shooting now and we have this Cat Stevens song in there. It’s a combination of stuff you’ve heard a million times, but it just feels perfect in this moment. Also our staff will find songs that I’ve never heard before that I just love. A lot of people comment on the music. A lot of other TV producers get mad and always say to me, “How the hell do you afford all that music?”

I have to tell you that I’m not particularly familiar with the whole comic book thing right now. I think they’re still trying to figure out what that’s going to be.

I’ll just say that there are a lot of ongoing discussions about what the comic book is going to be. What has been reported in the news of what it may be may not be what it’s going to be.

I’m not unhappy with anything having to do with it, I just wish there wasn’t all this press out there because I don’t think it’s really been decided yet what’s going on. I think they jumped the gun a little bit on that, but hopefully it’ll all work out.

[laughs] I was on a deal at 20th Century Fox and I was told that I needed to report to work immediately. I needed to go work on a show because they were paying me and I was just developing. I had just had a kid and I didn’t want to work on Family Guy because at the time the hours were horrible and it was the last thing I wanted to do even though I loved the show. So I went and worked there for a year. The hours were terrible, but I had a great time and met some really fantastic writers and many of which I worked with since then. One guy, Bobby Bowman, I brought with me to Yes, Dear and he’s executive producer on My Name is Earl with me.

Yeah but I can’t sit here and go, “I know what’s going to happen the next six years.” But by us pitching out what’s going to happen in season two, we’ve found a really cool place to end season two and a really fun, interesting way to start season three. It really shakes things up and gives us more places to go with this. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for the fans. In fact when I pitched to the network how I was going to start season three, they were like, “You’ve got to do that sooner. You’ve got to do that sooner.” I’m like “Hey. Pace yourself. If I do it sooner, then I’ve got to think of something else for later. Let’s just pace ourselves. There’s plenty of story to tell here.” So we know what’s on the horizon and we’re excited about it.

I grew up in Arlington, Virginia outside D.C.

I worked in radio actually during college and then right out of college I worked in radio for a brief period. But when I was 23, I packed up my car and drove out to LA. I knew one guy who worked at a Foot Locker. I slept on his couch in Orange County. I got a job as a PA on a sitcom and then in one year I got my first writing job.

It was called Step by Step with Suzanne Somers and Patrick Duffy.

Then the following year I was very lucky. I landed my first job on a sitcom and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Yeah, I got into this Warner Bros writers program when I was a PA and I wrote a Seinfeld spec. That got me my first job with Miller/Boyett Productions which had shows like Family Matters. I worked on a show called On Our Own, which lasted a season and then I worked on Family Matters with Urkel for two years.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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