My Name Is Earl: Our Other Cops Is On

On paper, this episode looked like a slam dunk. Easily the most memorable show from Season 2, "Our Cops Is On" was a frenetic half-hour of television that threw out the karma list theme in favor of wall-to-wall jokes and silliness. It was a great premise that matched Earl's criminal element with the long-running Fox show about, well…cops. It begs the question, is filming an exact replica of a previous show and stretching it into a full hour giving the audience too much of a good thing?

It's difficult, if not impossible to review "Our Other Cops Is On" without comparing it to last season's episode, because they are, in essence, the same show. The main and secondary characters are the same. The timing of the episode is the same, (taking place before Earl divorced Joy and discovered karma). And of course, the event of a Cops camera crew visiting Camden County is the same.

The only things that are different are the jokes, and they repeated a few of those, too. For example, the first time I saw a drunk Tim Stack (who wrote Part 1) wearing his Son of the Beach costume was funny/sad. This time, it was just sad. The first time Earl and Joy kidnapped Kevin, the poor Cops cameraman, it was a great twist. This time, it was almost expected. And of course, the first time I met the Camden police force, they managed to surprise me again and again with their incompetence. This time, there weren't any surprises.

The other misstep in this episode was dragging it out for an hour. NBC's hour-long episode of Earl thus far have been disappointing because the pacing of the show has been thrown off. Last season's Cops episode was crammed with jokes about Earl, Randy and Joy during their pre-karma days and also revealed small but humorous facts about other Camden County residents. That so much comedy could be stuffed into a half-hour is what made the episode work so well. This episode certainly included plenty of Earl, Randy and Joy getting into trouble, but that's pretty much all it was. If the first half-hour seemed redundant, the second half-hour was even more so.

However, this episode did have its moments. It felt like Yes, Dear stars Mike O'Malley and Billy Gardell (Officers Daniels and Hoyne) had more screen time than Jason Lee and Ethan Suplee. Along with their patrol duties, the officers were set to give an anti-terrorism demonstration at the Camden County July 4th fair, on the "first Independence Day since the September 11th 9/11 attack." Of course, the demonstration had disastrous results. Together with Officer Bowman, (The Drew Carey Show's Kathy Kinney,) they proved once again that the cops in Camden are just as thick-headed as the criminals.

The officers stumbled and bumbled their way through town, responding to domestic disputes, (involving a certain soon-to-be-divorced couple), multiple incidents at the strip club, (featuring a certain Latina stripper) and finally, the theft of $50,000 worth of hi-tech government surveillance and torture equipment, as well as the fireworks for the fair's finale, (taken by a certain pair of brothers). It makes you wonder how nice a place Camden County would be if all the main characters just moved away.

Overall, this episode had a few good jokes and plenty of crazy moments, including Officer Daniels' accidental shooting of a lamb, an infrared camera used to great comic effect and Randy and an inmates' joyful singing about the fiery death of "Tim Stacks" to the theme from Cops. However, this episode loses a lot of points because it was an inferior copy of a previous episode, and there wasn't enough plot to sustain another half-hour show based on the same premise, let alone an hour. In the end, this episode turned into a case of, "be careful what you wish for, you might just get it."