Actor Charlie Sheen is raging against CBS and Warner Bros. Television for cancelling the rest of the current season of “Two and a Half Men” – and finding other networks ready, willing and able to give him access to their airwaves.
Both ABC News and NBC News did interviews with Sheen, and then battled over getting on the air first. ABC had originally slated the Sheen interview for Tuesday primetime on “20/20,” but rushed to put segments on Monday’s “Good Morning America” (GMA) after learning that NBC had gotten its own interview, with segments airing on Monday’s “Today” show.
On GMA, Sheen blamed CBS for the Two and a Half Men production halt. “They’re in breach,” he said, and vowed to sue the network. “They’re going to lose in a courtroom, so I would recommend that they do an out-of-court settlement and fix this whole thing and pay the crew and get season nine back on board.”
This is how Sheen described his reaction to the cancellation of the rest of the current season: “I was actually disappointed, because I thought, you know, I think the mistake, mistakes, I made is that people misinterpret my passion and anger,” he said. The interviewer then noted that stopping the show is costing an estimated quarter of a billion dollars. “It’s going to cost them a lot more because they’re on a battlefield and they let their emotions and their ego, basically they strapped on their diapers. And so, they’re in breach. They’re in radical breach. And sorry guys, you screwed up.”
Sheen told GMA that he is now drug-free. He also brushed aside a suggestion that people think he may be bi-polar, asking what’s the cure for that? And, he said, if there’s medicine to cure it, would it make him like everyone else? He has no interest in that. But, he said, if he is bi-polar, wouldn’t there be periods when he crashes into depression? “I’m bi-winning. I win here and I win there. Now what?” Sheen said.
In the NBC interview, Sheen said CBS would be begging him to come back to work, but he wants $3 million per episode, not the previous $2 million he’d been making, due to “psychological distress.”
The actor insisted that he’d never missed a shoot of Two and a Half Men, only rehearsals. “I missed practice. We’re talking about practice … practice is for amateurs, you know?”
Sheen refused to apologize for his own behavior and his rants against series creator Chuck Lorre. Rather than have him apologize, Sheen insisted that CBS would have to apologize “while licking my feet.”
RBR-TVBR observation: Get the armies of lawyers ready. This will be quite a battle. There’s always the possibility that CBS and Warner Bros. will come to some sort of settlement with Sheen that would get him back on the set for season nine, but right now it is hard to imagine what it would take to accomplish that.
