Five years ago, CBS temporarily shut down production of Two and a Half Men, its enormously popular sitcom starring Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer. The stoppage was to allow Sheen to enter rehab for a drug problem. By the end of the year, Sheen had taped his last Two and Half Men.
I have never met Jon Cryer, but I have met Charlie Sheen. It was one of the bizarre brushes with the TV racket that occur during the TV critics press tour in L.A. At a Fox event I was led down back corridors, past the kitchen and out into a dark back garden. There, at a corner picnic table, in almost total darkness under an umbrella, were Sheen and a handful of critics.
That was January, 2012. For a while in 2011, Sheen's very public breakdown was the biggest story in the world. On that night, Sheen was rueful but unrepentant.
"I'm not crazy any more," he said. Asked gently about the insults he had thrown at everyone, the online rants and strange behaviour, he didn't hesitate: "It was a lot about what had been going on for all the years on the job. It was also 30 years in the business, pressure cooking up and finally saying all the things I wanted to say."
Cryer has written a memoir, So That Happened, and lengthy extracts have appeared in The Hollywood Reporter and the insights they offer into the Sheen breakdown are interesting.
There are merely amusing bits. During the show's first season, Cryer was surprised to be ambushed by Sheen and handed a shopping bag. Sheen said his then-wife Denise Richards was about to visit the set and what was in the bag had to be hidden from her. Cryer was wary, suspecting he was being asked to hold drugs. Instead, in the bag he found porn magazines.
What also amused Cryer was what Sheen managed to achieve in February, 2010, at the point when Sheen was about to enter rehab – he negotiated a new contract to get him $1.8-million (U.S.) an episode.
However, there was nothing amusing about Sheen's end on the sitcom. Cryer recalls it as excruciating. Sheen was "gaunt, pale, sallow, even sweaty occasionally. He started talking to himself. Most of all he just looked thinner, in a not-good way." He couldn't remember his lines and requested that he spend several scenes standing beside a couch. It was obvious he couldn't even stand without support.
What Cryer says about the ensuing public meltdown, is sobering.
"A curious phenomenon was bubbling up in the media as well," Cryer writes. "Entertainment culture had become so stultifyingly repetitive and predictable that Charlie's antics felt like a breath of fresh air. To some authors, commentators and bloggers – seemingly intelligent people – he was a rebel, a truth teller willing to poke his masters in the eye. They defended his baleful screeds. Of course, Charlie wasn't those things. He was simply lashing out at the people who told him the party was over. That he was actually just a human being with a monumental drug dependency mattered less to the pundits than his value as something to write about to alleviate their collective boredom. The fact that he could very well be dead soon was not their concern. In fact, it'd just give them more to write about."
Five years on from the first signal that something was terribly wrong with Sheen, let's assess. He got a big raise. And a lot of people adored him for being obnoxious when he was just a drug-dependent jerk. What Cryer suggests is correct – everyone was in the gutter with Charlie Sheen.