Get all your thoughts of collusion or favoritism or whatever other cynical ideas you might have, because the fact that Jason Lee’s the star of this show doesn’t make me more inclined to give it a pass. But Lee’s presence is only one of many reasons why NBC’s upcoming MY NAME IS EARL is already my favorite new show of the Fall TV season.

The show, which will debut in SCRUBS’s timeslot of Tuesdays at 9 PM on NBC (followed by THE OFFICE, which means a solid hour of sitcoms, and when’s the last time that happened?), is one of those that will make you scratch your head and wonder how conservative network executives could possibly have given it a greenlight? The fact that they did makes me happy for the influence that cutting-edge cable programming is obviously having on the development of new shows. So while I’ll eventually have to talk about all the LOST knock-offs and below-average new sitcoms that you’ll be subjected to, our first pilot of the year is, well, fantastic.

The title character of MY NAME IS EARL is played by Lee, and the character needed to be played by someone with his charisma to keep from coming off as a total degenerate. Charming degenerates are what Lee portrays best (compare his work in CHASING AMY to the more sedate guy he played in STEALING HARVARD and see what I mean), and Earl is likeably skuzzy enough to be a Coen Brothers character.

Earl, as the show opens, is a rumpled, messy, small-time loser who, in a drunken binge, married a skanky woman who was six month pregnant (easily played with the perfect degree of white-trashiness by Jamie Pressley). Soon enough, she’s pregnant again, only this time, the child is a bit, er, darker than Earl, his supposed father. Now cut to a few years later and his two sons, one of whom is adorned with a big, crazy afro, are both as ill-behaved as their mom is promiscuous. Earl’s degree of loserhood is topped only by his couch-dwelling brother Randy (View Askew fans will be doubly happy with this show when they see that his brother is played by Ethan Suplee, also charmingly skeezy). The two engage in petty crimes and heavy drinking (Earl’s brother’s safe beer limit is eight; when he hits nine, well, things happen) and generally wasting their lives.

Earl spends money he doesn’t have on lottery scratchers, all to no avail. That is, until the day when he wins $100, 000. He has all of five seconds to celebrate before he… loses the ticket (the brutally funny visual gag doesn’t deserve to be spoiled here). While he’s, uh, recuperating, he catches an episode of Carson Daly’s talk show. And the fact that NBC was able to feature Carson Daly on a show that entertained me is something they’ve never been able to do on Daly’s own show. But here, Carson is talking to his guest about karma and living a good life leading to good things. Earl, who’s lived nothing of the sort, reaches an epiphany of sorts.

He realizes he lost his ticket due to bad karma; to square things, he makes a list of everything he’s done wrong throughout his life, and all the people he’s wronged (the list numbers into the hundreds). He figures if he can cross all of these foibles off his list, his karma will be good once again. And in doing the first deed, picking up litter to make up for all the trash he’s tossed out the window throughout his life, his winning lottery ticket blows back against his feet. Now he’s really convinced, and a hundred grand richer.

Aided and abetted by his brother, who has no use for karma but likes the idea of continuing crashing on Earl’s couch and drinking more beer, and also by their new friend and hotel maid Catalina (Nadine Velasquez), Earl sets off to make right.

He decides to tackle the easy ones on the list first; this means helping make good with a kid from high school; seems Earl has been a lifelong bully as well as low-rent thief and loser. They track down his schoolmate, and observe him for a while. Earl settles on the idea that the lonely guy needs to get laid. He tries to help, with the help of his day-time hooker pal, and things go awry. So Earl has to get a bit more proactive in offering help… along the way, he and Randy, both of limited intelligence and typically small-town closed-minded, deal with their homophobia in a very funny way.

Trust me when I say that the scant details I revealed here don’t spoil anything about the pilot—it’s all about watching Lee and Suplee, and the well-cast Pressley (never thought I’d say that) and the others in the cast, perform some really witty, intelligent material. The writing certainly feels atypical of a sitcom, and the beats and rhythms are never going to impress the laugh-track crowd. In short, I loved it. The cast’s comic timing is impeccable, and while everyone on the show has their quirks, it never feels “quirky,” if that makes sense.

Through it all, the show’s going to work or not based on Earl himself; the audience can’t get behind a loser if he’s nothing but a loser. But Lee, wild, messy hair and WT demeanor aside, is so damned charming and funny that the show instantly wins you (well, me) over. I just hope that audiences that’ve been weaned on typical sitcoms will get behind it; it’s perfectly paired with THE OFFICE, anyway (no word on where it’ll end up once SCRUBS returns, but I’ve seen some of NBC’s other new sitcoms—there will definitely be some free space by November). It also makes it that much harder to sit through every other sitcom, because they’re all going to suffer in comparison.

Next Time: The WB's SUPERNATURAL