Who wants to watch One and a Half Men?

His middle name is Francis, and he lives in Paris with a woman named Rose. He's a classically trained pianist, who is afraid of Yosemite Sam. He loves Jaws, Dizzy Gillespie and Maker's Mark. And shortly before Sept. 19, he will be dead.

CBS's Two and a Half Men began filming its ninth season this week, and the hit show will resume with Charlie Harper's funeral, a two-part event featuring guest star John Stamos.

Charlie is the semi-autobiographical character played by Charlie Sheen, very well, until he was fired four months ago for reasons which have prompted the actor to file a $100-million (U.S.) lawsuit.

Pictures of the funeral episode appeared on TMZ this week, pictures of an austere coffin flanked by one of Charlie's signature bowling shirts. The image of the shirt is haunting. In light of Sheen's departure, it's like seeing Fonzie's leather jacket, roughly divorced of its context, in the Smithsonian.

But Fonzie's jacket is a sacred pop artifact. Charlie's shirt is a chilly symbol of the star's needless absence and forceful ejection. To add insult to fatal injury, Sheen's character (around which the entire show revolves) is not only being killed off, he's being replaced – according to leaked reports, by a lovelorn billionaire played by the 32-year-old Ashton Kutcher.

Kutcher is currently being interviewed by every major magazine and appears on the cover of Details this month (in the feature story, he's cagey and confident about replacing Sheen).

What was he doing before this? Being Rumer Willis's stepfather.

Producer Chuck Lorre's prideful dismissal of Sheen is the best thing that ever happened to the vividly talent-less Kutcher, and to the tune of $700,000 per episode (that's not Robot Chicken scratch).

If Lorre is gambling that Sheen's banging eight-gram-rocks-chic has passed, he's right on that point: Celebrity addiction is finally being viewed with fear and trepidation.

But Sheen looks good again; he's been quietly contrite for a long time. He's also signed for his own sitcom, based on the film Anger Management, and will get a celebrity roast the night Two and a Half Men premieres.

Which will you watch? One can barely look at the sitcom's cast now: how could they not have rallied around their star?

Or let him be killed? The death of Charlie Harper is a serious matter.

TV characters routinely disappear from soap operas; they disappear or are replaced, or die, in real life.

And, unless the character is minor or, the hapless Susan on Seinfeld, the deaths are carefully orchestrated to reflect the gravity of what is happening.

Consider when McLean Stevenson's beloved Henry Blake died on M*A*S*H, or when the great Carol O'Connell told us, in a one-sided conversation with Edith, that his wife had died in her sleep. These were heart-breaking shows that honoured how we had come to care about, even love, the characters.

"Charlie dying is not funny!" reads one of many posts about the funeral show: One is inclined to agree.

When Lorre made the CSI/ TAAHM crossover episode in 2007, he expressed concern about "doing a comedy with a murder in it."

The episode was successful because the murder victim, Charlie's mother's fiancé, was so insignificant, his death involved no emotional risk.

But Charlie Harper's death does.

We are viewers known to cry over a well-constructed commercial: How will we react to the death of someone whom many of us see more often than our own families?

Badly, because if it is played for laughs, as Lorre's final revenge on Sheen, it will be all the more sad. It is known already that his death by train is described as "a meat explosion."

Charlie Sheen, in life, is to be admired. He refused to be manoeuvred, unwillingly, into apologies and rehabilitation; with savage wit and fury, he revealed the machinations behind his hit show, the chaos at the very centre of his life.

Damn the torpedoes!

Charlie Harper is a little softer. The product, in his words, of "a cold, lonely, loveless childhood," Charlie is an emotionally walled-up heavy drinker and womanizer.

He is charismatic and generous. He remains lonely: On a perfectly acted episode-tag, he lies in bed and finally allows himself to think of a woman he loved and lost. Before making a wry joke, he cries out her name.

Episodes like this, or the one where Charlie takes Rose's face in his hands, passionately; when he tells his horrifying brother and mother that he loves them; or when he's merely mischievous, merely sweet, we are first moved, then reminded that Sheen is a real actor, and that this show works so well because it is predicated on his star essence alone.

As Jack Nicholson remarked, far more gravely, of JFK, it is not my idea of a good time to watch Charlie Harper get killed.

I won't.