[Author’s note: I usually reserve updates for the annual book version of my commentaries. But the national spectacle surrounding Charlie Sheen warrants this exception.]
Warner Bros. sent a letter to lawyers representing Charlie Sheen yesterday informing them that it was firing the actor from Two and a Half Men, effective immediately. Not surprisingly, that letter was made public almost immediately. Here, in part, is what it said:
Your client has been engaged in dangerously self-destructive conduct and appears to be very ill. For months before the suspension of production, Mr. Sheen’s erratic behavior escalated while his condition deteriorated. His declining condition undermined the production in numerous and significant ways. Warner Bros. would not, could not, and should not attempt to continue ‘business as usual’ while Mr. Sheen destroys himself as the world watches.
(Associated Press, March 7, 2011)
The only thing interesting or newsworthy about this development, however, is the way so many showbiz reporters and media commentators are now lauding Warner Bros. for firing Charlie. After all, 99.9 percent of them are on record saying that it would make no sense for Warner Bros. to do so. They invariably proffered that there was just too much money to be made off him, noting that his recent antics only increased his entertainment value in a way that is now all too perversely familiar.
By contrast, for the record, here is what I wrote about Charlie’s fate:
As for this hit show, it would take the swallowing of pride the likes of which would give even Shylock indigestion for it to continue – with him as its star – after Charlie referred to it in the above-referenced Los Angeles Times report as:
‘…a bad-joke-filled pukefest that everyone worships.’
Yeah, I’d say that’s a wrap.
(Charlie Sheen, the Daffy Gaddafi of Hollywood, The iPINIONS Journal, February 27, 2011)
And now it’s official.
To be fair, though, many reporters and commentators reasoned that Charlie’s latest bouts of aberrant behavior could not constitute just cause to fire him because he has been not just “dangerously self-destructive … and very ill,” but a serial abuser of women for many years. Even I made clear my dismay that, after letting him get away with so much egregious behavior, Warner Bros. finally fired him because of his anti-Semitic rant against the show’s producers.
Yet it must be said that even Charlie knew he had committed a cardinal sin in this respect. This is why he spent much of last week seeking absolution. Of course, this being Charlie, he did this by repeating, as if saying Hail Marys, that he couldn’t possibly say or do anything that is anti-Semitic because his criminal lawyer, his civil lawyer, his accountant, his agent, his ex-wife, his two children with that ex-wife, and his own mother, which means he himself, are all Jewish. (And now he’s promising to pay his Jewish lawyers millions in a vain effort to sue his Jewish bosses for firing him….)
I am mindful, however, that offended Jews might find his defense almost as specious as a white person defending his belligerent use of the N-word by saying that he couldn’t possibly say or do anything that is racist because his maid, his nanny, his gardener, and his driver are all black. Furthermore, it might come as a surprise to Charlie to learn that being Jewish does not make one immune to the charge of self-loathing anti-Semitism any more than being black makes one immune to the charge of self-loathing racism: Exhibit A – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Nevertheless, I appreciate why many will find this ulterior motive for firing Sheen capricious, arbitrary, and even discriminatory in light of all of his other, and arguably more serious, infractions. But I submit that, just as a racist rant would have crossed a red line in this context, his perceived anti-Semitism crossed one too.
That said, even though the mainstream media are bound to show less interest, Charlie will have no shortage of outlets to air his drug-fuelled antics. In fact he’s already generating a lot of buzz and, reportedly, mounds of cash with his tweets and YouTube chat show, Sheene’s Korner.
It’s just too bad that, within minutes of receiving his termination letter, he went to his Korner and launched into another manic rant that only manifested, in living color, all of the untenable traits Warner Bros. cited for firing him….
Alas, there is no end to many people’s interest in his ad nauseam raving about his tiger blood and Adonis DNA and ranting about his (former) bosses as losers and trolls. And let’s face it, far too many of us derive macabre pleasure from watching a person, especially a bona fide celebrity, destroy himself. But this, for Charlie, is “winning.”
All the same, it is instructive that Charlie resorted to snorting his cigarette butts to entertain his viewers after he himself admitted that he had run out of things to say on the first episode of his show. Ironically, he may now have an all too belated appreciation of the skill it took writer Chuck Lorre, the main target of his vile, anti-Semitic rants, to come up with funny things for him to say on 177 episodes of Two and a Half Men.
Of course, now that he does not have to worry about violating the morals clause of his terminated contract, Charlie might consider tripping out on LSD and broadcasting his hallucinogenic rants. That would surely generate better ratings than Snooki’s drunken rants on The Jersey Shore; i.e., if you’re into this kind of train-wreck reality TV.
In any case, I hereby declare that henceforth this weblog shall be a Charlie-free zone. Because, far from being funny or entertaining, his schtick just strikes me as sad, pitiful, suicidal, homicidal, and utterly unwatchable.
Sorry Charlie….
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