My Name Is Earl

Here is a trailer showing off some of what we can expect from Season 4 of Earl.  Among the highlights are a quick look at both Jenna Elfman and Seth Green.  The new season is coming on September 25.

Check it out!

Jenna Elfman (best known as Dharma on Dharma and Greg), is reportedly filming a guest role on an episode of My Name is Earl for the upcoming season.

According to E!, she’ll be playing the role of a cheerleading coach in the season premiere.  Should make for a fun episode!

After a couple of strange seasons (jail, coma, etc), it sounds like Earl will be back to “one list item per week” episodes for season 4.  According to an entry on TV Squad (which references the NBC Live Blog), things will return to normal next season.

Bobby Bowman, the executive producer of Earl, had this to say:

what we actually have planned is very back to basics, straight up, stand alone story list of the week kind of thing. It’s going to be old school Earl, just like the original. The story telling, the resolutions, will be more self-contained whereas before we were doing a lot more cliff hangers. And so we’re looking at a lot of stuff from the first season and bringing over the style of story telling that we were doing back then.

I like it.  It reminds me of Smallville in the early days.  For a long time, it was essentially a “freak of the week” — some random character would get affected by kryptonite and Clark would have to save the day.  As they drifted away from that format, the show really started to suffer.

Earl is very much the same way.  While I can understand why they’d want to mix things up sometimes, I’m glad they’re going back to what made the show great.

A fun link for you — TV IV has a page set up that has details of the list, as gathered in bits and pieces from the episodes.  Kinda cool!