Phoo. This whole My Name Is Earl business isn’t half dragging on. First, in this country, it was shunted around Channel 4′s schedules and then put onto E4, and in its home country it was equally as shoddily dealt with. Its cancellation was, in many, ways inevitable. It was also fairly inevitable that many of its fans were up in arms at the show’s shoddy treatment – there was certainly enough of them about. They started online petitions, Tweeted on behalf of the show and generally tried to stave off the show’s death. Now news reaches my that they may just have succeeded…

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For all our My Name Is Earl stuff, go here.

Yesterday’s Variety reported that the show’s maker, Twentieth Century Fox, is in talks with cable channel TBS about a new 13-episode series.

The channel already carries MNIE re-runs so TBS seems like a natural new home for the show. Talks are said to be in preliminary stages, and insiders have cautioned that a deal is far from sorted. But, for Earl fans, this is the first bit of good news since the show was cancelled by NBC. There were rumours that Fox would pick up the show, but that came to nothing.

It’s clear from all the online stuff that there is a still a huge fan base out there. Not quite big enough to sustain the show on one of the big networks, but big enough to make it on a cable channel. I can’t figure out what I think. Has this show already jumped the shark, or is there genuinely a life on cable for the show?