Charlie Sheen: What the Fuck Happened?

I’m not entirely sure why, but not a week goes by that I don’t think about that weird window in 2011 when Charlie Sheen was arguably the most famous and talked about man in the country, if not the world. 

From the vantage point of 2021, Sheen’s surreal moment of hyper-fame and Uber-infamy feels like a weird, coked-up fever dream, half nightmare, half Maxim power fantasy. 

When Sheen’s exceedingly public nervous breakdown became front page news he had just exited Two and a Half Men, a show so staggeringly, inexplicably popular that he commanded 1.78 million dollars an episode. 

Bear in mind that Sheen did not get paid 1.78 million dollars per season, although that would be an almost inconceivable windfall for doing something like starring in a television show like Two and a Half Men. No, Sheen got nearly two million dollars per  episode and that still somehow was not enough to keep him from constantly insulting Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre, the reason he was the most over-paid man in television history.

Along with the rest of the country, I was fascinated by the devastation that ensued when Sheen’s lucrative if soulless partnership with Chuck Lorre crashed into a brick wall and burst into flames. 

I’m inherently interested in narcissism, ego, celebrity, self-destruction, drug abuse and mental illness, and Sheen’s descent contained elements of each. But as someone who has experienced a major manic episode I could empathize and relate to what Sheen was goin through, even if the circumstances of Sheen’s manic episode was decidedly different than my own. 

Then again I owed my manic episode to a combination of too much work, too many drugs, too much stress and not enough sleep, self-care or stability. I suspect that was true of Sheen as well, though we handled our episodes differently. 

I found salvation in Phish and Insane Clown Posse and wrote You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me. Sheen decided to turn his mental illness into vaudeville and travel the country doing whatever it was that he did other than act for the benefit of crazed fanboys in his notorious Violent Torpedo of Truth tour.

We as a culture have never sufficiently processed what the fuck happened with Sheen when he flew off the rails and became notorious for manic rants about tiger blood and how he was high on the greatest drug known to man—being Charlie Sheen—rather than being a handsome star of film and television, as well as the son and brother of handsome movie stars. 

I keep waiting for someone to write a book about that period in Sheen’s life and American culture, or do a documentary series of a narrative series for Netflix. 

My friend Rob wrote a much buzzed about project about the theft of the Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson sex tape. I suspect there’s a similarly juicy, similarly fascinating movie or television mini-series about Charlie Sheen’s 2011. 

At the very least, it merits its own podcast. My own weird manic episode overlapped briefly with Sheen’s when he was one of several superstar hosts at the 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos. 

By that point exhaustion had set in. We were no longer fascinated by Sheen. We were tired of him and his weird ascent/descent into coked-up self-parody. 

Sheen thought Two and a Half Men could not succeed without him but the show simply plugged Ashton Kutcher, another arrogant Hollywood womanizer, into the lead role and the show coasted for four more insanely lucrative years, during which Kutcher was the highest paid actor on television, making 750,000 dollars an episode. 

Lorre has thrived in the past decade. In addition to Two and a Half Men he created The Big Bang Theory, Mom, Mike & Molly, Young Sheldon and The Kominsky Method. 

Where The Big Bang Theory remains puzzlingly huge, in part because it spawned a smash spin-off in Young Sheldon, Two and a Half Men has receded culturally. 

When was the last time you heard anybody talk about Two and a Half Men? 

Sheen’s career has never recovered from the events of 2011. He made a couple of movies, none of which went anywhere. For two seasons he starred in the TV adaptation of Anger Management but more recently he could be found on Cameo, selling his time and fame for considerably less than 1.78 million dollars. 

I don’t know if we will ever figure out exactly what the fuck happened back in 2011 and I also wonder if it matters to anyone other than me. 

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