Les Moonves speaks out on Charlie Sheen

0

Charlie Sheen has been all over radio and TV lately denouncing CBS – and sometimes CBS Corporation CEO Les Moonves personally – for cancelling the current season of “Two and a Half Men.” Now Moonves has finally spoken in public about the battle with his network’s highest-paid star.


Moonves was speaking Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference. Asked about the status of the show and its star, the CEO had this to say:

“I don’t want to spend too much time talking about it. All I can say is short-term, financially it’s actually a gainer for us. A repeat obviously gets somewhat less revenue than the originals – it’s a show that repeats very well. Doing eight less originals saves us quite a bit of money. I’m not saying long-term I want this to go on, or it’s great, but the repeat last night actually was the fourth highest-rated show of the night,” Moonves said.

“Going down the road I honestly, and I’m not going to comment a lot on it, I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, he’s on the air quite a bit these days. I wish he would have worked this hard to promote himself for an Emmy. So there’s no financial impact short-term, as I said it’s a positive. It has been at the nine o’clock time period where it launched a couple of 9:30 shows. The good news, ‘Mike & Molly’ right now is doing extraordinarily well at 9:30 and ‘Big Bang’ on Thursday nights is doing extraordinarily well. You know, I hope it’s back. We’ll see,” the CEO said in wrapping up his comments on Sheen and Two and a Half Men.