Winning: Who Is In Control of Charlie Sheen?
This past week no one could escape the public spectacle that is Charlie Sheen. After years of partying indiscretions, which the public laughed off with an eye roll, Mr. Sheen took matters into his own hands by submitting to a set of interviews that has given millions of people a brand new series of quotables. Rather than repeat dialogue from our favorite movies, we’ve taken to quoting, paraphrasing, and even printing on t-shirts, his musings.
The key is that Sheen has taken the initiative in directing his own public perception with a “best defense is a good offense” approach. Rarely do you see someone flaunt his or her rock n’ roll lifestyle, in real time nonetheless. Usually wild dalliances of this sort are reserved for the cautionary tale told in past tense a la VH1’s “Behind the Music. Who could forget the “E! True Hollywood Story” about Motley Crue? Instead, by using euphemism-laden addict-speak in an attempt to rally the public, he completely skips past, and in fact, challenges the mandatory public flogging and “Come to Jesus” forgiveness sessions normally administered by Dr. Phil, Oprah and others of that ilk.
In this case, it’s Mr. Sheen who is narrating his own deathwatch using a hungry media he knows all too well and new media tools like Twitter and Ustream to keep control. Media moguls from Mark Cuban to Howard Stern have offered him his own programs for clear expression. He is this generation’s slow-speed OJ chase except he is at the wheel. With him controlling the conversation and dictating the terms, all anyone can do is watch and wish they could be a fly on the wall at his house. Who needs to pay attention to Hugh Hefner and his faux marriages, meant only to promote magazine sales, when you can see the real thing?
Rather than watch, with that collective eye-roll, an aging playboy in a musty mansion, wouldn’t you rather witness, in shock, an out of work actor living with a pot model and a pornstar? And finally Mr. Sheen can be judged in the marketplace of ideas for his personal exploits because CBS and Warner Brothers certainly did not. They merely aided and abetted him all these years, promoting a TV show to a duped middle-America while he abused women and drugs.
With “Two and a Half Men”, CBS, the network that carried the program, and Warner Brothers, the production company behind it, are culpable. Earlier this week, the network’s CEO, Les Moonves, addressed the issue at a Morgan Stanley Technology conference in San Francisco. Moonves wishes Sheen “would have worked this hard to promote himself for an Emmy” and went on to say that canceling the remaining episodes actually saves CBS money. Rubbish, I say.
Not to defend Mr. Sheen and his behavior, but this is typical corporate backpedaling. These are statements said to potentially quell angry shareholders. The reality is that all these years, CBS & Warners needed Mr. Sheen’s antics to promote the show’s ratings because of similarities between his character on the show and his real-life persona. He flew just close enough to the sun to not burn up and cause a complete public spectacle while keeping those companies executives at bay. But now that Mr. Sheen is imploding in spectacular style and has gone way off the reservation, the genie will never go back inside the bottle and both companies have no choice but to feign ignorance and distance themselves. Warners has gone on to formally fire him from the show and are now counter-suing Sheen as if they are just now waking up to his behavior.
At the end of the day this public deathwatch of a very talented actor, who was handed fame at a young age, is pathetic and sad on all fronts. Mr. Sheen was not yet 21 when John Hughes presciently cast him in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. He shares one scene with Jennifer Grey in which his character freely admits that he’s in police custody for drugs. Within moments of the two characters meeting he manages to seduce her, much as he has managed to seduce the public in the last week. When he does return to television, except this time as the star of his own reality show, Mr. Sheen will have come full circle; from teen sensation to Lollapalooza sideshow.
But to criticize the general public for their fascination with this circus would be high-minded and pompous. This is just another train wreck in the town square, which in the age of Twitter, Facebook and a 24-hour news cycle has only been amplified to the loudest volume. Everyone has no choice but to watch and add their own two cents. But in time it will all pass and Lindsay Lohan will be out of jail, ready to start the cycle of public consumption and excess all over again.
So tell me, who exactly is winning here?
