Charlie Sheen's Toxic Humor on CBS
By Accuracy In Media: Andy Selepak (01/24/07)
Television has always pushed the envelope and often past the point of bad taste, but Monday night's episode of Two and a Half Men did not just push the envelope, it ripped the envelope in half. Then, CBS burned and threw it in the trash, where this show truly belongs.
The show began with one of the title characters, the Half Man, 13-year-old Angus T. Jones, asking Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer if you have to be smart to have sex. This is prompted by his comment that he sometimes hears his on-screen mother and her boyfriend having sex.
The discussion went downhill from there, as Sheen and Cryer spoke openly about sex in front of Jones, all in the name of generating laughs. This is nothing new for the show, as one of the running story lines is sex, sex, and more sex. But Monday night's show took it even further.
Later in the episode and thankfully in a scene that did not involve the 13-year-old Jones, the show descended into discussions of Cryer's character as a boy having sex with fruit, urinating into a Tang container, and using his on-screen mother's feminine-hygiene product as a breathing device, convinced by Sheen's character this was how the astronauts do it. More indecent comments are made, which will not be detailed here.
But two scenes of sexual depravity in the first 15 minutes were not enough for the writers of Two and a Half Men. Later in the show, and before I changed the channel in disgust, Emmy Award Winner Holland Taylor, who plays the mother on the show, joins in on the discussion. It is Holland who says she caught Allen's character with the family dog and a jar of peanut butter as a child. Although Holland, Cryer, and Sheen never explain this in detail, there is little left to the audience's imagination. The three are obviously talking and joking about a boy having sex with a dog.
That Charlie Sheen, son of liberal icon actor Martin Sheen, would be involved in such a perverted show is not surprising. He has been linked in press reports to a series of morally objectionable behaviors, ranging from consorting with prostitutes, to drug and alcohol abuse, gambling problems, child pornography allegations, and alleged wife abuse.
Having established himself as a libertine, with no recognized boundaries of acceptable conduct, it is not surprising that Sheen has also spoken out about the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, wondering whether U.S. officials were actually behind them. You can find his comments on a website called "prison planet," which claims that he is somehow a "credible" person.
It seems to run in the family. Sheen's father Martin, who played a liberal president in the West Wing show, and Charlie Sheen's brother, Emilio Estevez, have done commercials and promotional work to advance the ACLU's agenda. The ACLU is so extreme that it believes in the legalization of drugs and maintains that distribution of child pornography, after the material is actually produced, should not be a crime. This position is not advertised by the ACLU on its website but has been documented in William Donohue's book on the organization, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union. Donohue notes on page 296 that the ACLU adopted as its policy a statement that while it is appropriate to prohibit the production of child pornography by sexually exploiting children, "It is inappropriate, unnecessary and unconstitutional to prohibit the publication, sale, or distribution of such printed or visual materials."
American television, and American society as a whole, hit a new low on Monday night because of Sheen and CBS. Next week's show, believe it or not, is titled "A Pot Smoking Monkey."
Repulsive television like this should be brought to the attention of those at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) who are, by law, supposed to monitor and fine networks and stations for airing indecent programming that poisons our culture. The program airs at 9:00 p.m. EST and is watched by many young people, who should be protected against this filth.
The FCC has a procedure for filing complaints. You can find it here.
Andy Selepak, a writer at Accuracy in Media, is the author of the study, New Evidence of Liberal Media Bias, published as an AIM Report.
Media Monitor: http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/5185_0_2_0_C/
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