Hollywood's latest loose-cannon, volatile celebrity is the subject of tonight's hastily and eagerly scheduled ABC 20/20 special (10 pm. ET), titled Charlie Sheen: In His Own Words. ABC may as well have called it Charlie Sheen: With His Own Rope, because, based on excerpts aired already on Good Morning America, the star of Two and a Half Men hangs himself with almost every new, rambling, often frightening utterance.
In this new hour-long interview with ABC's Andrea Canning, he sounds less like actor Charlie Sheen than inmate Charlie Manson...
Monday morning at 7 a.m. ET, as GMA opened on the East Coast, the network that had televised the Oscars the night before opted to lead its morning news show not with a celebration of Hollywood's best and best-behaved and most glamorous, but with a lengthy taste of this exclusive visit with one of Hollywood's most excessive current misbehavers.
It's a perfect distillation of what's happening right now with so much of television across the board. Why celebrate and support the best when it's so much easier, and often more lucrative, to present and exploit the worst. Why present real drama when you can crank out Real Housewives? Why bother writing and directing Boardwalk Empire, when Jersey Shore basically writes itself?
ABC was so eager to push the Sheen interview, and push back its own next-day Oscar coverage, that the initial lower-third superimposed subject title was misspelled. (See photo at the top of this column.) Under the big headline EXCLUSIVE: SHEEN TO SUE CBS came the line quoting Sheen, but with sloppy transcription, that "There gonna lose in a court."
Yeah, and ABC better test there employees for spelling proficiency.
Sheen volunteered to take a drug test as part of this special (not exactly standard procedure for 20/20 interview subjects), and ABC reported yesterday that Sheen tested as clean for 10 specific drugs -- meaning that the tests could detect no usage within the past one to three days (the former for blood tests, the latter for urine).
Clearly, though, no one tested him for guano poisoning, because Charlie Sheen, even in the comments televised on GMA, sounds -- to put in indelicately but accurately -- Batshit Crazy.
Try this on for size:
"I AM on a drug," he tells Canning early on, in an interview taped at his home, when she asks if he's currently on drugs.
"It's called Charlie Sheen. It's not available, because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body."
Then he smiles, exposing his golden tooth (??!!), and asks, "Too much?"
Precisely. Thank you for sharing.
When his father, Martin Sheen, spun into insanity in Apocalypse Now, he was acting -- or, at least, exploring his demons while cameras were rolling. Charlie Sheen, even in just excerpts from this interview, makes it seem like he really does need help, though he's adamantly refusing it.
Just the fact that he smokes during the on-camera interview -- which was okay in Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person days, but is a basic public relations no-no in THIS century -- pegs Sheen as a celebrity displaying equal parts arrogance, rebelliousness and obliviousness. And put his remarks in this interview up against, say, Mel Gibson's answering-machine rants, and so far as Incoherent Ramblings go, it's a dead tie.
CBS pulling the plug on Two And a Half Men, for the rest of the season, makes perfect sense. And make sure to watch series creator Chuck Lorre's vanity card at the end of one of his other CBS series, Thursday's The Big Bang Theory, in case he wants to take the late-breaking opportunity to weigh in.
Each week, Lorre writes a new vanity card that viewers can read by freeze-framing the image. The most recent first-run episode of Men ended with Lorre describing how much care he took these days to eat well and exercise and avoid drugs and alcohol, and adding that, "If Charlie Sheen outlives me, I'm gonna be really pissed."
Professionally, Sheen may not outlive him. If Sheen's father, brother and loved ones can't convince Charlie Sheen that he's not nearly as amazing and in control as he thinks he is, even TV's highest-paid star (which, in this case, I've never understood) can't be coddled indefinitely.
But even if Charlie Sheen doesn't get help and restore himself emotionally, he does have a future in TV. Not acting. Just acting badly.
Tuesday's 20/20 is bound to get huge ratings. And if Sheen ever wants to support his lifestyle and his hangers-on without the Men money from CBS, he can always sign on with E!, MTV, VH1, WE or another bottom-feeding cable network to star in his own reality show.
Hell, set him up in a Malibu beach house with Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson, and let the fun begin.
You could even call the show Two and a Half Brains.
But that might be overly generous...