Is it a coincidence that two of the most beloved characters on TV right now are unwashed dudes who've won the lottery?

Earl Hickey of NBC's "My Name Is Earl" and Hugo "Hurley" Reyes of ABC's "Lost" are marginal creatures normally pushed into the background of shows and loosely defined on casting-call sheets as slackers No. 1 and No. 2. Yet, this time around, they're full-blooded characters. Hurley exudes a convenience-store clerk Buddha on a deserted island, while Earl is a born-again samaritan at a motel that serves as headquarters for his new lease on life.

"My Name Is Earl," while lacking the art direction and deeper cultural critique of the movies that seem to have influenced it, nevertheless represents a sea change in network comedy.

NBC, trying to reinvigorate its prime-time schedule, has seen "Earl" become its ray of hope, a series that is ranking so well among 18- to 49-year-olds that NBC is said to be considering moving "Earl" to Thursday nights. That's the night that NBC used to dominate, its comedies replete with twitchy, verbose guys in clever Banana Republic V-neck sweaters and T-shirts, unafraid to expose their feminine sides.

It's simplistic to define Earl as NASCAR counter-programming, because the character, as embodied by Jason Lee, transcends the red state/blue state divide. On paper, Earl is a former petty thief with redneck tendencies, but as played by Lee he's more of an indie-comedy antihero — less defined by geography than movie iconography.

Ditto Hurley on "Lost," played by Jorge Garcia, whose Latino roots don't factor into a show so savant about pop culture it seems like one giant reference to movies.

A few weeks ago, in flashback, we learned that Hurley's former life was unambitious: a McJob at a fast-food joint and off hours spent at a used-record store, a la "High Fidelity." In the flashback, he quits his job because he knows he's going to come into lottery money, but he is not too psyched about the big win, money being its own curse.

Similarly, when Hurley is put in charge of a food supply, he panics. It's the panic of the movie slacker: The thing he fears most is becoming management.

It is a measure of the new durability of this slacker type that Hurley and Earl — basically the same sentient pop-culture reference — occupy such vastly different environments, neither of which can be found on a map: One is a nameless island, the other a nameless town outside a nameless city.

The ethos of the movie slacker is about the search for identity in a culture homogenized beyond recognition, where the young are cast adrift. Not doing anything about any of this is a form of protest. Thus, Hurley on that island is just Hurley on that island; he's both the least resourceful castaway and the most believable.

Both characters have migrated to TV from beloved, deadpan movie comedies like "Slacker," "Clerks," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Office Space" and "The Big Lebowski"; Internet Movie Database lists 47 titles under the keyword "slacker." These movies work because they capture the rhythms of the unspectacular life as lived by the man of low ambition and offbeat obsessions.

For all the aimlessness and lack of engagement they're accused of, slacker stories are pushing culture forward in one sense, at least: by throwing out some well-worn signposts of geographic, economic and even racial difference.