By GREG DIXON
Well, here we are, nearly halfway through the first decade of the 21st century and still waiting for the next great American sitcom.
It may be that reports of the genre's demise have not been exaggerated. Only Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm - a wildly funny comedy that's rather too anarchic and ambiguous for it ever to have mass appeal - suggests there might be something left in the beast yet.
But Two And A Half Men (7.30 tonight, TV2), one of the more successful comedies to emerge from the Hollywood laugh machine in the past 12 months, does not engender much confidence that mainstream American sitcom has the ideas to pull itself out of a considerable slump in quality in the past few years.
Mind you, this comedy of two brothers - and one of their sons, hence the half in the title - under the same roof has gathered what looks, on paper, like a fairly handy group of cast and crew. The lead, Charlie Sheen, has audience-pulling-power, and the show's creator, Lee Aronsohn, was author of the moderately successful Cybill.
There has been plenty of pedigree among the directors of the first three episodes. Andy Ackerman has helmed Fraser, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and James Burrows is perhaps the most experienced sitcom director in America, his credits running back to 70s classics such as The Bob Newhart Show and Taxi through to popular 90s comedies Friends and 3rd Rock From the Sun.
But on the first three viewings, the potential of the talent has been sunk by scripts that have veered wildly between fratboy innuendo and hug-and-learn mush.
Sheen is Charlie, a smug, 30-something jingle writer (he claims to have written the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme) whose apparently comfortable lifestyle is devoid of responsibility but is high on casual sex and drinking. His brother Alan (Jon Cryer, probably best remembered as Ducky in Pretty In Pink) is his polar opposite - an uptight, control freak who has been thrown out of his home by a wife who suspects she is a lesbian. He and his son Jake (Angus T. Jones) have ended up under Charlie's roof, which happens to be a beach home in Malibu. So the combination of comic elements is obvious and cliched - the wise-ass cool guy who gets the laughs and the neurotic straight guy who sets up the gags.
Then there's the sitcom kid who helps the wise-ass learn to be a better man. "Why didn't you have kids?" Jake asked in the first episode. "I don't know," Charlie said, "maybe because I love me more than anything else in the world." Barf.
The only slightly unpredictable and mildly interesting element (although an oddball minor character is Sitcom101), and a curiosity for local audiences, is that Charlie has a stalker called Rose, played by our own Melanie Lynskey (Heavenly Creatures, Snakeskin). Rose, a former one-night stand, is there to generate laughs, to be standing at the window and just staring in, or gluing cupboard doors shut. It's a little hard to tell whether she has been underused or whether the writers are not really sure what to do with her. Time will tell.
There has been some imagination in some of the setups. The second episode's rather mad flock-of-seagulls-in-the-bedroom palaver was genuinely inspired, but mostly there is a tiredness to proceedings.
The heart of the show is Sheen, who has played a lot of comedy in his time - although not always intentionally. He has the gift of timing. But it is interesting that in this and his last sitcom outing, Spin City (which he joined for the last three seasons after Michael J. Fox left), both his characters have been named Charlie. That suggests, as does much of his performance here, that Sheen has perfected the art of playing Sheen and this, finally, is the vehicle dedicated to it.
Perfecting the art of playing himself
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