Why Charlie Sheen’s New Show Falls Short
by Maureen Ryan
Famous people who go spectacularly off the rails frequently have to hire high-priced PR firms and spin doctors to repair their public image.
Charlie Sheen, on the other hand, is getting paid to refurbish his image, via the sitcom “Anger Management” (premieres Thursday, June 28 at 9 p.m. ET on FX).
You may think I should just review the show and not talk about Sheen’s history. But Sheen has been playing himself for a long time — he’s the one who’s essentially asked audiences to conflate his public identity and the characters that have padded his bank account for decades.
So it’s not really possible to discuss “Anger Management” without pointing out that it’s lucrative spin control disguised as a traditional sitcom. In the show, Sheen plays a therapist named Charlie who has many women in his life: An understanding ex-wife (who is still understanding after Charlie menaces her boyfriend with a lamp), a sweet daughter who looks to him for guidance, a friends-with-benefits fellow therapist, a woman in his therapy group with rage issues, etc.
The interactions with these women are all designed to make Charlie look magnanimous, wise and kind. And because audiences frequently transfer the feelings they have about a character to the actor playing that character, this repulsive show will no doubt go a long way toward solidifying Sheen’s image as a harmless party boy (an image that the media is all too willing to go along with), and erase the image of Sheen as a man who has repeatedly been accused of being violent toward women.
Read the rest of this review here.
