Greg Garcia on the key to creating a successful comedy:

"The trick is luck. It’s luck. I mean, you write a script and obviously you need a script to get everything [and to] get the ball rolling. But then it’s luck based off of that. Sure, you can write a script that people want to come and do but the right actors need to be available and interested to come in and do it. And then you’ve got to find the right director to come in and create a vision off of this thing and to create a visual template that we work off of, which is a huge part of what Earl is. Then you’ve got to surround yourself with very talented people who can keep the thing going. We’ve been very lucky around here, we’ve got the right people. We’ve got a lot of hard-working people and - unfortunately, there is no trick or formula or you’d see everybody doing it. It’s just [that] lightning has to strike."

Jason Lee on the show’s non-traditional approach to the sitcom:

"I guess I just never had much of a traditional approach. I knew I didn’t want to do television to begin with, I just wasn’t interested. That’s why it was such a tough decision to ultimately decide to do My Name is Earl, because it was television. But I just kept going back to how good the script was and how different it was. My concern is, as I’ve voiced to Greg at the very beginning, was how much can we do being that it is on a mainstream network television station like NBC. But they gave us the freedom and Greg ran with this crazy idea. And lo and behold, the fans came on board and we created our own little thing amid this kind of very, sort of corporate, well-oiled machine. You’ve got the outcasts part of it and they’re getting along just fine. And I’m perfectly comfortable being on a show like this where it’s got just enough respect. It’s got the fans, and they’re very diehard fans, and I think it’s a good balance. I really have to credit Greg with that. At the end of the day, as goofy and out there as it can be, the characters are all likeable and there really is a message and there really is a heart at the core of it. I think that’s what keeps people coming back and watching it."

Jason Lee and Greg Garcia on the evolution of the series:

LEE: Well, at the end of season one, we started talking about, 'Hey, maybe we should start branching out and doing more with the other characters.' Because if we isolate each episode to one list item, we were kind of feeling that it could perhaps - if somebody missed an episode, they wouldn’t necessarily miss anything else having to do with the storyline. And so we started serializing the show a bit more going into season two - Joy’s whole court, getting in trouble, her three strikes, the whole thing. Then you have some stuff going on with Randy and Catalina, so I think the list is always the driving force. But it seemed like when we started branching out and making it more about following stories that were happening with all the characters instead of just Earl and one list item - I can’t speak for Greg - but I’m assuming that it sort of made things exciting and opened a lot of doors in terms of possibilities.

GARCIA: We’ve taken some bigger swings with stuff, which certainly opened doors. You know the prison thing? That was a big swing to send after episode season two, to send your main character to prison and then also say, 'You know what? We’re going to keep him there for half a season.' We didn’t know going into it how many episodes we’d be able to get off of that. We just sat down and we figured them out and then we just figured we’d had enough and we’d get him out at a certain time. And we hope people enjoyed that, we hoped people enjoyed going into that world for a second. And it wasn’t like everybody knew. The audience knows we’re not going to stay in prison forever. The series didn’t change. But it’s a new venue to go to and it certainly keeps things fresh for us with stories and stuff, so we’ll continue to take swings like that. What we’re doing for the second half of the season is pretty different with the predicament that we have Earl in as well. So I think it’s a combination of that and how we tell stories, because even just telling the list stories each week, if you find different ways to tell them, it just keeps things fresh. We’ve done episodes where we have somebody else narrate and we do it with their version of the story and we like a "puzzle pieces" episode. We did a story last week where we kind of did the whole thing backwards and flashed back. It was just new [and] interesting storytelling devices also keeps things fresh."

Jason Lee on how long it takes to grow his moustache:

"Five to six weeks. To get it full, yeah. That’s the time allotted for the moustache."