Charlie Sheen: Real American Asshole

To say Charlie Sheen is acting a little funny these days is like saying he has a little sinus trouble. The man has officially gone nuts, N-V-T-S, nuts. His ego has expanded past the boundaries of the known universe. In fact, there is no ego with him anymore; it's all id, all the time. The man blew a multi-million-dollar-per-episode gig in what was, I've heard, the highest rated sitcom on air, because he couldn't manage to stop sticking things up his nose and, when told to get his proverbial shit together, called his bosses meanieheads, took his toys, and went home. This from a man whose best performance was his 30-second appearance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This after he, in, what three years?, blew out two marriages with women who seemed balanced (at least in comparison to him) and gave him four children, and is now living with two barely legal overly tanned bottle blonde porn starlets "goddesses." That doesn't smell like a downward spiral at all there, Carlo.

As wacktastic as his behavior has been, however, it barely even registered on my radar except as another instance of spoiled celebs behaving badly (which sounds like a reality TV title, except that we've already seen that show). What pissed me off enough to bother writing a post was when he held the show hostage. I was unfortunate enough to catch 5 minutes of Two and a Half Men when a rerun came on after something else I was watching and I couldn't find something to switch to quickly enough. It was standard sitcom nonsense, canned laughter and all; but as I said, it was very highly rated, and employed dozens, if not hundreds, of people. By refusing to act like an adult (you know, coming to work, not snorting illicit substances, not bragging about your icky sexual proclivities), he put production on hold to the point that Warner Bros. had to 86 the rest of the season. All those grips and stagehands and assistants and wardrobers were suddenly without work until Sheen decided to put on his big boy pants. And then, because he couldn't just quietly pull himself together, he declared a war of words with the producers -- nothing is this guy's fault, after all -- which ended today in Sheen's getting the boot. What do you think is going to happen now, Charlie? This isn't a soap opera. They can't just swap actors in and out for characters and pretend no one's going to notice. It's dead in the water. You pretty much single-handedly wrecked the livelihoods of the off-screen support people. They'll find jobs again, sure, but whereas they used to have an all-but-guaranteed paycheck for as long as the writers could keep cranking out formulaic jokes (the kind the average American likes best), they have to get that resume all polished up and go out begging at the studio door again like everyone else in the Greater Los Angeles area. It's one thing if a show is cancelled in general, but this show was essentially torpedoed because you had to get into a pissing contest with Chuck Lorre.

Actually, now that I think about it, this will work well for the show's first episode or two back next season. Warner Bros. hasn't pulled the plug on the show altogether, and I'd bet any amount of money that it will be back in the fall, which would be WB's way of saying "nanny-nanny-boo-boo" to Sheen. All the old viewers and a few new ones will tune in to see what they did with Charlie's character, who the new guy is (rumor mill says John Stamos is a possibility, who I think is better than his reputation, though he's apparently on Glee - another show I don't watch, which is probably why it's still on -- and thus would be more difficult [and expensive] to woo away), and how they're going to reconcile the disaster from back in the spring. And then I would take my winnings from the previous bet and place them on the probability that, by mid-season, all those same looky-loos will have faded away once they realize that the show jumped the shark about five years back when the kid's voice dropped. I will then take my winnings from both of those bets and gamble that Sheen's future screen time will consist of a failed appearance on Dancing With the Stars, a losing season of Celebrity Apprentice, and conclude with a half-assed stint on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

That is, if anyone remembers in September that any of this happened.