The Better Half Of Two And A Half Men 3/29/10

It’s been hard for me to reconcile what appear to be Charlie Sheen’s auditions for The Shining II in real life, with the truly extraordinary actor.

I watched him in Wall Street again the other day, and it is a performance of incredible range and talent for such a young man.

Every night, I watch double episodes of the sitcom Two and A Half Men, whether I am in the UK or the US; I can pretty much recite them all by heart now, but Sheen still makes me laugh out loud every time, just as the brilliant Jon Cryer (who won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series this year – so, so deserved) makes me both laugh and cry, as his character lurks often pitifully in his seemingly more successful brother’s shadow.

The character Charlie (played by Sheen) is the drinking, fun-loving, sex-craved one; Alan (Cryer – his character often lives up to the actor’s surname), the divorced one, has been living in Charlie's Malibu beachside home since his marriage broke up, and appears to have very little going for him.

He has virtuallly no luck with women, gets a hangover if he so much as breathes the same air as a Budweiser, and has the greater moral conscience.

But he is much nicer to his mother than Charlie is, and tries to keep his own food-obsessed son Jake on the straight and narrow, as the boy is passed from mother to father and back again, with several pizzas and buckets of fries acting as the middle men.

But why, in many US comedy shows, are there so many women have absolutely no, or certainly very well hidden, redeeming qualities? Lilith (Cheers, Frasier); Ros and the unseen Maris (Frasier); housekeeper Berta (Conchata Perrell), Alan’s ex-wife Judith (Marin Hinkle), and the brothers’ mother Evelyn (Holland Taylor) in Two and a Half Men?

True, many of Charlie’s women have some nice qualities, but these fly-by-nights are generally out of the door quicker than Charlie can say . . . Well: “Don’t slam the door on your way out.” Fiancée Chelsea was a very rare exception; it is the three monstrous women who dominate the female part of the show.

In the UK, it is generally the females of sitcoms who set the moral barometer; they are the ones to whom the other generally hopeless characters (usually men) turn to, in order to find clues as to how they could, or should, be running their lives.

In the US, you wouldn’t look to any of the above-named women for directions to the bathroom, let alone your life path; you know they would only point you to the cellar, lock you in and throw away the key.

So who sets the moral barometer in Two and A Half Men?

It’s Alan’s son, Jake, played by Angus T. Jones, who was just a month off his 10th birthday when CBS first aired the show in September 2003 – and it is this character who ultimately defines the show as the most moral comedy on television.

That’s right: Two and A Half Men is the most moral comedy show on US television. And that is the real key to its enormous success as a family comedy.

It has the most promiscuous sex, the most heartless and cruel women, the rudest (though most daring and riotous) jokes, and yet, at its heart, a very moral tale: two grown men, seemingly at odds, little realising that what binds them is not only their relation to each other by blood, but the thing for which they are both searching, albeit in very different ways. Namely: how do you find the right person to love?

It's a primal journey, common to most people, of both sexes, the world over. It's just that Charlie gets his end away more often en route - as it were.

But Jake is the touchstone to which they both keep returning. Jake's curious questioning of life and sexuality is governed by Charlie; the importance of having a conscience is monitored by Alan.

But in both men essentially (and in Charlie's case, unconsciously) competing for control of the youngster, the men constantly have to reassesss their behaviour and lifetyle while in his presence: the young spectre at the grown-ups' feast.

In reality, Jake is saner than both his father and uncle (and certainly saner than his mother). He is the calm voice of reason, questioning both men’s behaviour, as he grows up surrounded by people who don’t know how to love because they were not, quite simply, loved by their mother.

Jake is loved by everyone, which automatically gives him the moral high ground. His security in being wanted by mother, father and, jokingly reluctantly, by Uncle Charlie, enables him to look with bemusement and wonder at the people denied what has always been given to him freely and unconditionally.

He’s a young child of divorced parents (which helps); he has crushes – on girls and older women; he loves telly; and we’ve seen him grow from pre-pubescent into handsome, funny and smart young man – without his incurring, or our ever having had to see, all the problems that this transformation usually entails in real life.

Oh, yes; and he’s always been very cute – and Jones is a damned fine young actor, as both the pre- and post-pubescent Jake glaringly reveal.

After Sheen’s recent spell in rehab, recordings for the new series were put on hold, but filming resumed two weeks ago.

I really can’t wait for it to come around again. My guess would be that it will now be Jake who starts competing with his Uncle Charlie for the same girls, which will bring Charlie’s insecurities to the fore.

That’s Charlie the character, not Charlie from The Shining II, by the way.

I’m not suggesting you swop your Bible for DVDs just yet, but there are a lot of moral lessons to be learned in Two and A Half Men, where love really does conquer all.

Even if it is often Jake’s love for whatever he’s thinking about putting in his belly next.

Ready For My Close-Up, Mr Ferrer 3/18/10

Judge Alex Ferrer.

He keeps me awake at night.

Seriously, I think I am in love. I know he wears a wedding ring, but I figure that with all the TV commercials asking people to pack up their gold in brown envelopes and send it to places like “We at the mail office steal your gold marked GOLD ENCLOSED”, he might be tempted to ditch it.

Then he would be free. For me. For all I know, he is married to a stunner, but then so was Tiger Woods, and that didn’t stop him trying to land a few more holes.

I confess to being addicted to the US celebrity judge programmes. In the UK, it started with Judge Judy, who hasn’t changed her hairstyle in a decade, and is terrifying in a head teacher kind of way.

I don’t want to sleep with her, which helps me concentrate on the legal aspects of the programmes, and I now feel that I could sit as a High Court judge in the US courts and act just as efficiently as she does.

I can’t help noticing, though, that the people in her courtroom are fatter than the ones on any other, and that if Judge Judy just sent them all off to Weight Watchers for a couple of weeks, they might drop a few pounds and resolve their differences more calmly.

I like People’s Court, with Judge Milian, who is, like Judge Judy, seemingly right about everything, but I just want to know who her dentist is. She really does have the best teeth of any of the judges, and she also has Harvey Levin, who stands outside the courtroom, chatting to locals about what they think should happen inside.

Poor Harvey. I specially feel for him on days when it is raining and no one gives him an umbrella. The general opinion of the hapless bunch that surrounds him is “String ‘em up”, irrespective of the crime, and when Harvey says “Goin’ back inside the courtroom,” there is more than a hint of “Thank the Lord for that, get me away from these lunatics asap” about him. He is the Ryan Seacrest of the legal world, always central to the action, but always a Cowell away from true glory.

But back to my beautiful Alex. He’s an ex-cop, attorney, Florida Court circuit judge (the only time I have ever been tempted by the idea of enrolling for "circuit training", to be honest), and I would disrobe him in less time than it would take you to say “Guilty m’lud.” He is clever, funny, he loves the narrative of the absurd stories that unfold before him, and he always manages to get to the sexual nitty-gritty in which the other judges show relatively little interest.

So, let’s say you stole a vase from your ex-boyfriend’s mother’s house. Within seconds, Judge Alex would have managed to extract from you exactly how many times mom and pop had had sex before they bought the vase (and in which positions), where said vase was on the dresser the last time they had sex before it was stolen, and even whether the vase was used for any improper purposes before it took up residence in the new (illegal) home.

If I were to choose anyone to sit down and watch a porn movie with, it would be Judge Alex. Fully robed. Briefly. Then I would want him to handcuff me, put me behind bars and make me beg on all fours . . . Well, you get the picture. And if you don't, apparently it's illegal for me to text it to you.

A man is never more sexy than when he is at work; and a clever, witty man, who holds power, and who is articulate, who stands on the moral high ground, yet with just a hint of smut on his shoe, is always going to top my list.

In fact, I am thinking of stealing a vase, just so that I can be on the receiving end of one of Judge Alex's admonishments.

We don’t have cameras in courts in the UK, and it is yet another reason I love being in the US. Judge Alex is my lunch hour, and as I can barely eat with excitement when watching him at work, he is proving very good for my weight loss, too.

I’m keeping an eye on that third finger, left hand, just in case he becomes available. But while that gold stays in place, lock up your valuables; I am a woman on a mission.

The only flaw to my reasoning will be when I end up in Judge Judy’s courtroom, after Judge Alex takes out a restraining order on me.

Jaci's US Box - Introduction 3/18/10

Welcome to my new blog, which is going to be sharing my thoughts about television. Despite having been a TV critic for over 20 years, I still can't seem to get enough of the box.

Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, How to Make It in America, Law and Order - these were just some of the things I caught on US TV yesterday alone.

There is not a day, in the US, where there are not at least half a dozen shows that I really want to watch; many of them are brilliant. There is a range and skill here that I rarely see now on TV in the UK. It used to be there by the bucketload, but I have seen it go so far down the plughole that I think this period in Britain will go down as the Tarnished Age of Television.

It is often argued that reality TV is an indication of the democratisation of a culture that was (at least in Britain) established as an elitist sport. Today, as we know, that has all changed: anyone can be a star, and pretty much anyone can get on TV, to spout whatever rubbish they like, or to wash, air, or sell their grubby laundry.

You can share your love, your addictions, your crimes; your clothes, your plastic surgery, your deformities. And if you're not happy with you who are, there is any number of experts to help you turn into someone else.

But is it really true democracy, in which the supreme power is invested in people collectively; a society in which everyone has equal rights and privileges?

Of course it's not. Reality TV breeds puppets - easily exploitable commodities, who have no more control of their own strings than they ever did. They are all participants in one vast Truman Show, dancing to the tune of an audience that has elevated mediocrity and invariably the stupidity that goes with it, to an art form.

That doesn't mean that a lot of it isn't great fun; but please, let's stop intellectualising it and calling it progress.

It's getting harder for the Brothers and Sisters of this world to get made, and impossible for them to get a slot better than 10pm on a Sunday night. Really good shows are being dropped because they aren't reaching the advertisers' target audiences.

But despite the Kardashians and their ilk, I feel more optimistic about the future of the visual medium in the US than I do in Britain, where the alleged democracy the industry claims we are seeing on screen, still never manages to filter through to the largely white, male, middle class corridors of power.

As Orwell said: all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
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