Making Amends
I had heard a lot about this series but had yet to watch an episode of it myself until this final season arrived for review. I did some reading up on the premise to get ready for this review. Basically, Earl, played by the shows producer and lead actor Jason Lee, is a fairly unintelligent man who was a bit of a bully or thug in his day. In the very beginning of the series, Earl wins the lottery, but is promptly hit by a car. While in the hospital, he watches an episode of the Carson Daly show which mentions the idea of karma — an idea that hadn’t hit Earl (no pun intended) until that day.
Earl decides to make a big list of all of the people he’s hurt in one way or another and use his lottery money to locate them and make amends, or apologize. Most of the episodes revolve around this premise, but some other story arcs developed over the course of the four seasons that diverted from this idea.
With Season 4, things are similar in their regular charming and humorous way. Earl, his best buddy and fellow former school bully Randy, his ex-wife Joy and her husband Darnell, and the beautiful Catalina are all back. The twenty-seven episodes include: The Magic Hour, Monkeys Take A Bath, Joy In A Bubble, We’ve Got Spirit, Nature’s Game Show, Randy’s List Item, Witch Lady, Gospel, and the rest of the twenty-seven episodes. I can’t say I really have a favorite of this bunch, but they’re all entertaining for a thirty minute sitcom. For detail summaries of each episode, I would point you to a site like tv.com or tvrage.com.
Being a newcomer to the series, I don’t know for sure how well long time fans of the show received this season, although from what I can tell the response was positive.
The Blu-ray Release
We received the fourth/final season on Blu-ray for review and I’m pleased to say the image and sound quality are great. Each episode packs a punch of vibrant, sharp colors and edges. There is some noticeable grain usually associated with TV shows, but this isn’t hard to overlook and forgive. Visually, this is a fine looking Blu-ray. The audio quality didn’t disappoint either in this primarily dialogue based show. I found the audio to be well balanced and clear.
As for extra features, there are several in this four disc set. The first three discs contain deleted scenes while the fourth disc contains deleted scenes and other features. The breakdown looks like this:
-Deleted Scenes (SD, 20 minutes across all four discs) – Disc one contains four deleted scenes totaling nearly five minutes while disc two has five deleted scenes running about seven minutes. Disc three includes three deleted scenes lasting about three minutes, and the fourth disc has four scenes running five minutes.
-Gag Reel (SD, 8 minutes) – A collection of bloopers and outtakes from production during the fourth season; I appreciate that it’s expletive free and generally pretty funny, even for a show newcomer like myself.
-2 The Max Trailer (SD, 1m20s) – This brief ‘trailer’ is for a fake film that is discussed within the show that would star Randy as President and Earl as Director.
-Fan Mail (SD, 33 minutes) – I enjoyed this feature more than the others. In this, Earl sits down just outside of a set on location during production and discusses fan mail. Various members of the crew read the submitted questions allowed, and then the camera skips around to the various actors around the set for their answers. Some good questions are asked and the cast and crew do a great job answering them. Nice to see the show give back to the fans in this way.
That’s a wrap for this Blu-ray; to the summary…
