“Two and a Half Men” [ 1/2] (two and one-half stars)
Tonight at 9:30 on CBS
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BEHOLD the wonder of Charlie Sheen.
This man seems to expend no energy whatsoever in his TV roles and yet, he manages to come across as totally hilarious.
All he has to do is slump there in a chair with a look of utter bewilderment on his face and he can get a laugh.
In “Two and a Half Men,” Sheen’s new series on CBS, it’s his co-star, Jon Cryer, who has to work hard for the laughs.
Cryer’s the Felix Unger of this sitcom, which can best be described as “The Odd Couple” with a kid.
Cryer’s the one who is splitting from his wife, who is tired of his compulsive fussiness.
Sheen plays his more-easygoing brother, but the Sheen character is no Oscar Madison. A successful composer of jingles for the advertising industry, Charlie Harper (Sheen) lives in a beautiful Malibu beach house where he entertains a succession of free-wheeling females.
Cryer’s character, Alan, shows up at his brother’s house with his 10-year-old son (Angus T. Jones) – the “Half” in “Two and a Half Men” – and the two brothers, plus kid, begin living together.
And basically, there’s your show: Can these two men live together (with a kid) without driving each other crazy?
Well, let’s hope not, or you’ll have no show.
As it is, there’s not much of a show already.
However, Sheen is so entertaining to watch that the series at least earns a 2 1/2-star rating. It also earns one on the basis of its name, which invites the irresistible parallel.
Advice to CBS: If you’d have named the show “Three and a Half Men,” then a 3 1/2-star rating might have been just as inevitable.
Or maybe not.
Whether “Two and a Half Men” will be still standing after two-and-a-half months or two-and-a-half years depends on what they wind up doing with the two brothers (and the kid) now that they’ve gone to all the trouble of getting them into the same house.