Two And a Half Times Four

I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. My Internet service provider recently displayed a graphic on its home page referring to a link to a story about CBS's schedule changes for the 2012-13 television season.  The graphic showed a picture of David Caruso of "CSI: Miami" juxtaposed alongside a picture of the cast of perennially popular but critically loathed "Two And a Half Men," and I was supposed to click on the link find out which of the two shows got canceled.  I did.  To my dismay, it was "CSI: Miami" that was gone.  I was not dismayed because I love "CSI Miami - in fact, I don't watch any of the "CSI" shows - but, rather, because I hate, hate, really hate "Two And a Half Men."

But, before I carp about that, let me tip my hat to David Caruso.  He took a big risk leaving ABC's "NYPD Blue" for a movie career.  He then ended up getting himself in deep trouble by associating himself with the 1995 bomb Jade, which he must have been attracted to because its screenplay was written by Joe Eszterhas - without realizing that the esteemed screenwriter was going through a particularly lame period in his career in the mid-1990s (Eszterhas wrote the screenplay for Showgirls at the same time).  But, Caruso was able to get back on his feet, landing the role of Horatio Caine in "CSI Miami" and finally having a huge success in his post-"NYPD Blue" career; "CSI: Miami" lasted ten years.  So he goes out as a success, with his head held high.

That out of the way,  I am unhappy to report that Ashton Kutcher will continue as a failure - and he should wear a bag over his head.  "Two And a Half Men" has been renewed for a tenth season - Kutcher's second - despite the fact that the show has gotten so much more crude and misogynistic, even longtime fans are turned off by it.  Plenty of viewers find Kutcher a weak replacement for Charlie Sheen - hardly surprising, considering that he can barely carry a Nikon Coolpix commercial - and my mother, no prude, finds the increasingly frequent references to sexual organs to be in bad taste.  Alas, enough people were taken in by Kutcher's boyish charm, dopey charisma, and rudimentary line-reading abilities to keep the worst show on the air today . . . on the air tomorrow.

I have to hand it to Chuck Lorre for making such a mean-spirited show last so long.  "Two And a Half Men," on the surface, looks like just another male-denigrating sitcom, having presented male characters who are either a hedonist (Charlie Harper), a loathsome, nerdy schmuck (Alan Harper), an idiot (Alan's son Jake), or a overgrown boy (Walden Schmidt, the character Ashton Kutcher "plays").  But dig deeper, and you'll see how women are portrayed in an even worse light - they're either creamy virgins waiting to be deflowered, domineering mothers, manipulative whores, or nasty harpies.  In the end, the show demands that you actually sympathize with the title characters for dealing with such females.  I left every episode I had the misfortune of seeing wishing that an earthquake would cause the Harpers' beach house to fall into the sea with the Harpers in it.  Now I wish for Walden Schmidt to join the remaining Harpers - all one and a half of them - in such a fate.

Oh yeah, the show's sexism doesn't stop with the storylines.  Lorre's associate Lee Aronsohn recently complained about the huge preponderance of gynocentric (a fancy word meaning "woman-friendly") TV shows - further proof that the war on women isn't just being waged out of Washington and 29 governors' mansions.

Long ago on this blog, I predicted that "Two And a Half Men" wouldn't even last two and a half seasons.  Now I'm convinced that the series will last at least as long as "Gunsmoke" did.  CBS promotes "Two And a Half Men" as America's most-watched  half-hour comedy, which is only partly correct: It is America's most-watched half-hour show.  All of which goes to show you that P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken were R-I-G-H-T.