I have to admit to having a guilty pleasure when it comes to current TV sitcoms and it's Two and a Half Men. I got slightly hooked on the "I can't believe they just said that" vibe a year or so ago when watching the syndicated reruns on a local station and I started watching the new episodes on Monday night on CBS. In doing so this week, I noticed how thin and dissipated Charlie Sheen looks.
TAAHM is basically TV's longest-running After School Special. Not quite unlike "very special episode"--child molester, drug addiction, racism, take your pick--of Diff' rent Strokes, it's a cautionary tale: Kids don't do any of what you're about to see at home. Because as the pace of Charlie Sheen's descent into rehab hell quickens, the Charlie he plays on his TV show becomes more and more of a bad punchline. Hey, did you hear the one about the TV star who's a drunk and womanizer in real life? Turns out he plays one on TV, too!
In the last few months it seems like barely a week goes by when we're not confronted with a real-life Sheen rerun. He trashes a hotel room--at New York's Plaza, no less--while with a hooker, as his ex-wife and two daughters sleep down the hall. He pops off to Vegas for a weekend and ends up with three porn stars, including the overly-tattooed and overly-exposed "Bombshell" McGee. He finds an escort online and e-mails her...from his AOL account (a definite sign that he's out of touch with reality) and tells her he's an "A-list star" that she'll want to meet.
So when does the Charlie on the TV show start to make amends and take control of his life...when the real-life Charlie does so? Will it take a major intervention to put the brakes on his partying? Where's his dad and brother in all this? This past week, at a TV confab in LA the head of CBS--Nina Tassler--admitted the network's concern over Sheen's incredibly public private life, but that nothing could be done as long as he shows up for work. A reporter pointed out to her that in pretty much any other job he'd be fired by now. In the meantime, the ratings are up, but does it occur to Tassler and her money-counting cohorts at the network that people are tuning in see the walking, talking train wreck that Sheen has become?
Maybe everyone is waiting for that very special episode where the show becomes One and a Half Men.
The thing that is so sad about Sheen is that he really is a good actor. He was great in "Platoon," for instance.
Posted by: Sheldonia | January 21, 2011 at 08:31 AM