Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen has skirted disaster as a wayward, middle-aged party boy who regularly tested the patience of the TV network and studio trying to protect their valuable sitcom property.
It was a violence-tinged and anti-Semitic radio rant that helped push him over the edge and, finally, forced CBS and Warner Bros. Television to take action.
In a one-sentence joint statement Thursday, the companies said they were ending production on television’s number-one sitcom for the season, a decision based on the “totality of Charlie Sheen’s statements, conduct and condition.”
The production halt leaves CBS eight episodes shy of the 24 half-hours it had expected to air as the cornerstone of its Monday night comedy lineup. And it makes the network and Warner, which reaps hundreds of millions from the show in syndication, the potential go-betweens between Sheen and Two and a Half Men executive producer Chuck Lorre.
Lorre bore the brunt of Sheen’s attacks during the radio interview and in a subsequent “open letter” sent to TMZ after the CBS-Warner decision and posted on the entertainment website.
In the letter, the actor called Lorre a “contaminated little maggot” and wished the producer “nothing but pain.”
Those remarks, along with his comments to Jones, veered from ludicrous to self-aggrandizing to threatening. For a man who has battled addiction and faced allegations of domestic violence, the outbursts raised troubling questions about his state of mind and his most recent effort at rehabilitation.
CBS and Warner had tolerated Sheen’s recent misadventures, including wild partying and three hospitalizations in three months. The TV season was interrupted for Two and a Half Men after Sheen was briefly hospitalized last month following a 911 call in which he was described as “very, very intoxicated” and in pain.
Sheen signed a new two-year contract at the end of last season that reportedly pays him about $1.8 million per episode.
Plans were set for taping to resume next week. Then came the Jones radio interview and the attack on Lorre that reeked of anti-Semitism.
“There’s something this side of deplorable that a certain Chaim Levine–yeah, that’s Chuck’s real name–mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy, bro. Check it, Alex: I embarrassed him in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that his unevolved mind cannot process,” Sheen told Jones.
