"Earl's" a winner with a cast of losers

Greg Garcia is a guy who doesn't forget his roots. He sprinkles Washington, D.C.-area references throughout his sitcoms. He named one son after the Baltimore Orioles' Camden Stadium and then used the name Camden for the fictional setting of his quirky NBC series "My Name Is Earl."

But where did he get the inspiration for those hilarious low-life characters?

As it turns out, at the beach. The collection of losers who inhabit the Thursday night comedy had their genesis in Garcia's head one summer when he was hanging out with his family at Nags Head, N.C., he said.

The idea: A fairly stupid but good-natured loser wins the lottery, is hit by a car and, while recovering, hears TV's Carson Daly discuss the concept of karma. Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) gets the message: He needs to straighten out his so-called life.

The result is a sitcom that looks at the bottom-dwellers of American life.

Viewers like the karma

"I've always been drawn to the world these people live in," Garcia said. "I believe in karma. I like the idea of people having an awakening in life and changing. So it was sort of the perfect storm."

The cast includes Earl's hapless brother Randy (Ethan Suplee), illegal immigrant Catalina (Nadine Velazquez), Earl's ex-wife Joy (Jaime Pressly) and her husband, Darnell (Eddie Steeples). Beau Bridges periodically shows up as Earl and Randy's father.

"Earl" earned a 2006 People's Choice Award for best new comedy. The show won an Emmy last Sunday night for writing — though Lee and the show itself were not nominated, drawing complaints from some critics.

Garcia, 36, who grew up in Arlington, Va., and graduated from the same high school as his mother, knows a bit about setting the bar too low. Because his high-school SAT scores were less than stellar, he said, he applied to only one college, Frostburg State University in Maryland. He was accepted.

"And it turned out to be the best thing, because Frostburg had a television writing program that got my script sent to Warner Brothers," Garcia said.

Garcia, who had worked on Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser's radio show, thought his future was in that medium.

But after college, he set out for Los Angeles with his parents' encouragement and the name of a junior-high classmate of his mother's who had become a makeup artist. For a while, he slept on the couch of a friend from high school who was working at a Foot Locker store. And he made certain to look up his mom's classmate.

Drawing from what's familiar works for Garcia. And Michael Pennie, a writer for the show, is a friend of Garcia's from high school who Garcia said once lived in a trailer.

Hired his friend

Garcia first hired Pennie as a writer and co-producer for "Yes, Dear," his CBS sitcom that began in 2000, then for "Earl."

For "Yes, Dear," Garcia even named the characters Greg and Kim, after himself and his wife.

Greg and Kim Garcia and sons Camden and Nathan, 5 and 8, periodically visit their parents in the Washington area. "And I try to get to a Redskins game every year," he said.

Garcia mentioned the Redskins so often in "Yes, Dear" that he wrote and asked team owner Daniel Snyder whether he could sit in the owner's box for a game, and Snyder agreed.