Of Swords and Parasols

The boys watched Season 1 of MNIE about three times last year. The first time I was paying attention. The second I half paid attention, but wasn’t annoyed. The third got my normal sitcom reaction, but I don’t think we can blame that on the show. More like too much repetition. Since we can’t use our TV anymore (for now) I borrowed Boy I Have No Adjectives For’s Season 2 set and watched it over the weekend.

MNIE is about Earl Hickey. Earl, his brother Randy and his Wife Joy are…well…to call them "poor white trailer trash" would be an insult to poor wife trailer trash. Earl and Randy are career criminals, Joy is a complete slut, none of them have jobs, and everyone hates their guts. Joy scammed Earl into marrying her the night they met when she was eight months pregnant. They made it work, and a few years later, Joy had Earl Junior…who was black. Earl, with some "encouragement" from his father, did the responsible thing and took care of Joy and the kids. A few years after that, Earl bought a lottery ticket and won $100,000…and promptly got into a car. While in the hospital, Joy tricked him into signing divorce papers giving her everything but the lottery ticket money, threw his stuff out, and moved the father of her second son in. In the hospital, Earl saw something about karma on TV and had an epiphany…the reason all that bad stuff was happening to him all at once was karma. He’d spent his entire life screwing other people over, so life was screwing other people over. So Earl cashed his lottery ticket, moved himself and Randy into a cheap motel, and made a list of every bad thing he’d ever done.

Now, Earl and Randy go around approaching everyone Earl-often in conjunction with Randy-had ever done something bad to, explain what they’re doing, and try to fix it. Randy and Joy and the parents show up a lot. They’re often aided by Catalina, a frank speaking illegal immigrant with a huge and complicated family. Sometimes people try to shoot them on sight. Sometimes people make them suffer. And sometimes, it ended up actually making the person’s life better. And Earl, never to be deterred, does everything he can to somehow make their lives better, growing up bit by bit himself in the process. In addition, he’s finally becoming someone his parents could be proud of, and now that they aren’t sleeping together, he and Joy are finally friends. Though it takes an odd form, there’s actually an ongoing plotline and consistent character growth.

It’s not something I want to own, and I need something else, however little, going at the same time, but I like it, and all the characters. And I have to say that one of the best things I’ve ever seen is when the extremely temperamental Joy, on Happy Pills her lawyer had her get a prescription for and turned into a pacifist, saw a neighbor throw a beer can through a window and hit one of her sons in the head with it. After that, Joy got up, went over to the neighbors’, and very cheerfully explained that she was on happy pills, but she was going off them now, and when they wore off in three days, she was going to come back over, and since she wasn’t entirely certain what her normal self would do to them, she very carefully detailed out all the possible things she could think of. I searched youtube last night, but sadly couldn’t find the scene.