'My Name Is Earl' isn't lying down on the job post-strike

[Brian Damage]

LOS ANGELES — The cast of My Name Is Earl is back for its first day after the 100-day writers' strike, and the actors are happily greeting one another, the writers and the production staff.
A bearded Jason Lee (Earl) says hello to Nadine Velazquez (Catalina). Jaime Pressly, who plays Earl's ex-wife Joy, accuses him jokingly of being less enthusiastic with her.


"So we begin," Lee mutters, signaling a return to normalcy.

So the TV season begins — again — after an unscheduled, three-month-plus break. For NBC's Earl, a comedy filmed without an audience, production gears up at its warehouse-like studio as actors and writers gather at a table to read the first of nine post-strike scripts.


Earl, which is averaging 7.5 million viewers, is one of dozens of scripted series that are now rebuilding dismantled sets, setting up lights and cameras and getting wardrobes out of storage. Writers, starting new scripts and dusting off partially finished ones, must revise season-long story plans for what will be spring mini-seasons of four to nine new episodes.

Challenges include:

•Revised plotlines. With abbreviated seasons, lack of availability of some guest stars and months to mull over a show's direction, some writers are reworking story plans drawn up before the strike. Many say they found the time off creatively refreshing.

With the long pause from the writing treadmill, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry thought up a season ending "that will raise some eyebrows." Dealing with major story lines in six fewer episodes than planned may provide a silver lining for the ABC series. "In every single episode, something big will happen," Cherry says.

•Compressed production schedules. Many series, which can have up to 10 scripts ready when shooting starts for the fall season, now must go script-by-script, speeding up writing as production begins. "There's a sense everything is in overdrive," says Al Gough, executive producer of CW's Smallville. Executive producer Miles Millar and Gough "sent an e-mail to the staff saying, 'Guys, we're not going to hit the ground running. We're going to hit the ground sprinting."

•A general rustiness. "I came back and said, 'I'm not sure I remember how to do this,' " says Hart Hanson, executive producer of Fox's Bones. "I went into a meeting and waited for somebody to start the meeting and then I thought, 'Oh, it's me.' It was just everybody finding their feet again. Everybody is very happy to be back."

Viewers are pleased they're back, too, if cheers from the studio audience at last Friday's first taping of CBS' top-rated comedy Two and a Half Men are any indication. "It was kind of a homecoming," says executive producer Chuck Lorre, who also oversees The Big Bang Theory. "It was a great big wave of affection, and I think it made Friday night particularly special."

Middle-of-the-road return

When we last saw Earl, in an episode broadcast Jan. 10 but produced months earlier, the karma-conscious Everyman was unconscious in the road after being hit by a car, a reference to a similar accident in the series' pilot. By the time the show returns with a two-parter on April 3 (8 p.m. ET/PT), poor Earl Hickey will have been comatose for nearly three months.

"While the strike was on, Earl's been lying unconscious," Lee says on Monday, the first day of shooting, as he stands on a suburban street just feet from where the accident is being re-created.

The most recent episode served as a cliffhanger of sorts, Earl's fate hanging in the balance at the same time that he rejected the karma that had turned his life around. That episode, "Bad Earl," which was to have been broadcast late last year, featured Christmas references and had to run close to the holiday, Earl creator Greg Garcia says.

With the long delay and shortened season, Garcia has restructured Earl's story arc and created a larger role for guest star Alyssa Milano (Charmed), who plays Earl's potential love interest — the driver of the car that strikes him and a fellow accident victim, hit by a car driving in the other direction.

"We've rearranged stuff for the better. I decided I wanted to move two (planned) episodes to the end of the season. They felt like a season-ender," Garcia says. (He worked in a fast-food restaurant during the strike, partly to research a possible book and partly to reconnect with working people who don't frequent sitcom sets.)

For Lee, who shaved his strike beard Monday while keeping Earl's signature droopy mustache, coming back after the hiatus is an easy transition. (It doesn't hurt to kick things off with a dialogue-free day and your character in a coma.)

"When you're on a show as long as we've been on this one, it's like you're seeing your friends after the weekend," he says. "It feels like we were here a week ago."

There's extra hugging, however, and others acknowledge a time gap that was much longer than the usual summer filming hiatus.

"It's that weird first-day-back-at-school type of thing. I think it'll be a slightly abnormal day and then hopefully, by the middle of the week, we'll be back in the groove," says Ethan Suplee, whose character, Randy, pleads unsuccessfully for medical help for his brother in the scene being filmed.

Lee and company are working from the script they read the previous week, which Garcia and his staff had written in just a few days after the strike ended. The writers aren't easing Earl back. They've packed the first script with stunts and visual effects in an attempt to return with a bang. To mark the occasion, NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker will appear in a cameo.

"There's no ramp-up," says director Marc Buckland, who had the added bad luck of losing a day of pre-production work to the Presidents Day holiday.

Squeeze play

Time strains are being felt on every set. After the strike, Ed Bernero, executive producer of CBS' Criminal Minds, wrote a script that could be produced quickly and requires a little less time-consuming location work than usual.

Lost's producers, who will lose three of the 16 episodes planned for its fourth season, will sacrifice some character stories temporarily to make sure they can answer the season's central questions. The three episodes will be added to the 32 scheduled for Seasons 5 and 6.

"The fundamental story arc and mystery resolution of Season 4 was set up in last year's finale. The basic question is how Jack and Kate got off the island, who else is with them, what happened to the people who didn't get off the island and why Jack wants to get back to the island. We owe all those answers in Season 4," executive producer Damon Lindelof says. "There are stories we wanted to do this season, for example, more of the back stories of the freighter folk, that we had to shelve" until later episodes.

At Earl's studio building, the production staff adapts to the shrunken schedule. In just two days, a largely empty warehouse floor has four "room" sets in various stages of production, thanks to round-the-clock construction work. Crewmembers had taken down prison sets for a completed story line when the strike started, knowing that would speed production when the show came back, line producer Henry Lange Jr. says.

Crewmembers also restored Earl's nearby trailer park, where windows had been boarded and plants covered when the strike began. Six feet of weeds greeted workers there. "Normally we have a few weeks; in this case we had four days to prep everything," production designer Randy Ser says.

Because the writers expanded a previously planned Earl story line, the wardrobe staff had to scramble to find extra sets of the pajamas the character was wearing when he was hit by the car, costume designer Robin Kennedy says.

Garcia added to the pressure by asking to do nine episodes, rather than six, and starting with a two-parter instead of a single episode. He says he wanted to produce as many shows as possible for the crew, actors and writers, because "every (lost) episode is money out of their pockets."

"The benefit, assuming we do nine good episodes, is like ripping a Band-Aid off. You got it done quick. You didn't agonize over it."

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