Rude Awakening: The Low-Down on the Long Ride of 'Two and a Half Men'
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When the hoary old Chuck Lorre sitcom “Two and a Half Men” signs off for the last time with a one-hour episode Thursday night, it will be remembered fondly by CBS ad sales executives, Warner Bros. TV studio execs and fans of a sort of giddy, lowest common denominator raunch. The rest of us may well wonder how the show lasted as long as it did.
Make no mistake, “Two and a Half Men” was a phenomenon. In closing out its 12th season on CBS, the show stands as the longest-running multi-camera comedy in TV history. (Boasting a 14-season run on ABC, the straight-laced family comedy “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” was shot as a single-cam.) At its peak, “Men” was the 10th most-watched series on TV, and even a near-death experience in 2011 couldn’t topple it from its perch as one of broadcast’s priciest ad buys.
But you don’t have to be a town elder in “Footloose” to apprehend that “Men” was perhaps the most relentlessly smutty entertainment franchise this side of Fox’s “Family Guy.” Leering coke goblin Charlie Sheen tattooed his signature brand of charismatic debauchery all over the show’s heaving flanks, while Jon Cryer lent an air of sweaty urgency to his role as Alan, a hapless single dad. Each script was stuffed with jokes about Alan’s enthusiasm for, um “roughing up the suspect,” Charlie’s boozy licentiousness and pretty much any bodily function you might care to name. (Not for nothing does the Google search for “Two and a Half Men” + “fart” expel no fewer than 95,400 results.)
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