Chapter 8 -- Two and a Half Men p.195
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Personally, I recall that I had been a fan of Two
and a Half Men, but I always cringed somewhat with the concept of a show about
a household where a child was being brought up without much supervision and the
complete lack of parental discretion that was being exercised. In Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen’s
character was uncle to the youngster involved and he was a forty year-old
alcoholic, womanizer who floated through life yet received all the rewards that
society at the time could offer. He had
a beach front house in Malibu, beautiful women, nice cars, essentially the ability
to be totally selfish in his actions.
His brother was considered an amusing sidekick who was divorced, broke
and generally just a bit of a square. He
usually tried to do the right thing by his son, but was ostracized by his brother
for being such a loser. The son grew up
on TV to be portrayed essentially as someone with no intelligence and no
prospects for the future.
Upon a personal collapse by Charlie Sheen, Ashton Kutcher
was put into the role. He was a youthful
internet billionaire who had the mind and social awareness of a teenager. The son at this point was relegated to making
bathroom humor and being a dopey young adult who smoked a lot of pot. The producers of the show, at this time,
chose that the father’s character should become somewhat mentally unstable and
had him in and out of stressful conditions until the show went off the air in
2015. The show tried many tactics to
keep up viewers and resorted to the bottom of the barrel, I thought, when they
introduced lesbian grandmothers.