I watch hardly any broadcast TV these days. The Simpsons and the PBS Newshour I both see with some regularity, but otherwise, aside from the odd late-night talk show or episode of 24 or West Wing...that's really about it. We're now in the middle of the new fall TV season, but I'm certainly not making a point of seeing new series, the way I did when I was a kid.

But the other day I happened to catch one new sitcom on NBC.

From its magazine and newspaper ads, the show looked like it might be in the Beverly Hillbillies/Dukes of Hazard tradition....in other words, a stupidly coarse high-concept show about working-class white rustics.

Clip: "You know that guy you see going into the convenience store when you stop off in that little town on the way to grandma's house? Sort of shifty lookin' fellow who buys a pack of smokes, a couple lotto scratchers, and a tall boy at 10 in the morning? The kind of guy you wait to come out before you and your family go in?"

But, the new show amazed me.

Clip: "Well, that guy is me. My name is Earl."

My Name Is Earl is flabbergasting because the premiere episode anyway was a brilliantly coarse high-concept show about stereotypical working-class white rustics. Sitting at home alone watching a new network sitcom, I chuckled. More than once. Out loud. That hasn't happened to me in years.

The premise of the show is that Earl, a young redneck, has an epiphany that launches him on a quest to apologize and make up for all his life's many misdeeds. Well, that could have-- should have led to a stupid, unwatchable show. Instead it's genuinely witty -- in its raunchy, broad fashion -- and completely original. As well as charming.

My Name Is Earl makes funny jokes about race when Earl's scheming slutty wife cuckolds him with a black friend. It makes funny jokes about hookers as well as about really stupid and handicapped and gay people, and about homophobia. My Name Is Earl is a show, in other words, that is genuinely - and for a network staggeringly- un-PC.

But the hero and the show also, in their improbable, skeevy way, have a world view that's compassionate and progressive. It's about real redemption even as it makes fun of all-American instant redemption. It's sentimental in a way that somehow manages not to sell out its satire.

Now plenty of people, particularly a certain kind of intelligent, refined, solemn person (a sort of person who probably listens to a lot of public radio) won't like this show. But the rest of us, maybe intelligent but not so refined or solemn, are eager to laugh like we did at All In The Family 35 years ago-- laugh sometimes with pleasantly shocked little gasps.

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