"Two and a Half Men" Closed for the 2011 Season

Charlie huffed and he puffed and he got the hit CBS cash cow "Two and a Half Men" (Mondays 9 pm ET) shut down for the rest of the 2011 season. While the alcohol and drugs and women could keep the man down, it was his mouth spouting insults about his boss Chuck Lorre and various other rantings on a recent radio interview on "The Alex Jones Show" that became the straw that broke the CBS camel's back.

While part of me thinks it was the drugs, booze, and women that resulted in this latest Charlie Sheen antic that cost him and the rest of the "Two and a Half Men" cast its gig, this is more Charlie's attempt to escape his typecast role.

Before "Two and a Half Men" took off and became the comedy hit people love, Charlie Sheen flexed his acting skills in films like "Red Dawn," "Platoon," "Wall Street," and "Young Guns" during the 80s. He was a younger and more aggressive actor. Roles began dwindling and became less significant in the 90s so when he was offered to play himself in "Two and a Half Men," it must have looked like an easy paycheck for him. But now that the show is getting old and the characters are playing caricatures of their former selves, maybe Charlie wants to go back into acting in different roles so that he will be remembered as something more than Charlie Harper. He just needed to find a way to get out of his show. This is his Hollywood sized midlife crisis.

No matter what the job is, work eventually sucks. This is especially true when the job becomes repetitive without challenges or hope of a promotion. Charlie Sheen starring as Charlie Harper was an easy run for a few seasons. Both he and his character were booze drinking, sex with women having party animals. Eventually the fine line between art imitating life and life imitating art became too blurry to tell. The last Hollywood celebrity I recall constantly melting down after being stuck in a hell of typecast roles and public personality was Anna Nicole Smith and we know how that turned out. Maybe some ranting and raving is needed to move CBS enough to take the action needed to write Charlie off the show next season or pull the plug.

It would be a shame to bid farewell to the idiot man-children we knew as the Harpers, But perhaps Charlie Sheen's example may provide an opportunity for Angus Jones and Jon Cryer to go beyond a pair of one trick acting ponies.