Plot
Earl Hickey, a thief, narrates the last few years of his life, explaining that he married a six-month pregnant woman named Joy while drunk in 1999. Earl and his brother Randy moved in with Joy to a trailer park. Earl and Joy had their own child, Earl junior, in 2001, but he was a black boy, implying that Joy cheated on Earl with African-American Darnell "Crab-man" Turner.
In 2005, Earl wins $100,000 in the lottery, but is immediately hit by a car and watches the ticket blow away. While he recovers in the hospital, Joy divorces him, and Earl is introduced to karma while watching talk-show host Carson Daly; do bad things and bad things happen, do good things and good things happen. This makes sense to Earl, so he decides to try to make up for all the bad things he has done and makes a written list of 259 items.
After leaving the hospital, Earl and Randy move into a motel where they meet a pretty Mexican maid, Catalina. When Earl picks up trash to atone for item #136, "I've been a litterbug", he finds his lost lottery ticket. He decides that karma works, and as such resolves to continue making up for items on the list, beginning with #64: "Picked on Kenny James".
Earl, Randy and Catalina find Kenny's parents' house, and Earl sends Randy to find out from them where Kenny lives. Randy poses as former class president looking for Kenny, but offends the Jameses who call the police. Regardless, Randy makes his escape with the address. Earl spies on Kenny to figure out how best to help him. Kenny's life is good, but he has nobody to share it with, so Earl decides to hire a prostitute, Patty, to have sex with him. When Kenny refuses free sex, Earl talks to Kenny in person, not understanding why he turned down sex. However, Randy finds homosexual pornography in Kenny's nightstand. He and Earl, never having met a homosexual person, flee the house.
Although he tries to ignore Kenny, calling the list item "special circumstances", Earl is shortly thereafter attacked by Joy and realises: there are no special circumstances. He returns to Kenny's house and asks why Kenny doesn't have a man. Kenny answers that nobody knows he is gay, and he is afraid to go to a gay bar. Earl agrees to come with him, to give him the confidence needed and cross Kenny off his list. They go with Randy to a gay bar, where Kenny builds up the confidence to talk to a man. He thanks Earl and says he can cross him off his list.
Read more about this topic: Pilot (My Name Is Earl)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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