Charlie Sheen Was Never That Interesting

On a recent episode of the podcast Who? Weekly, millennial hosts Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber lamented that the slow death of cable TV has choked off a vitally important information pipeline: marathons of I Love the (insert decade here), in which talking heads from the worlds of music performance, freak viral fame and (mostly) comedy would reminisce about the big events of a given year. Topics could include anything from high-profile legal cases to briefly important consumer products, O.J. Simpson to Tamagotchi. Without the lessons imparted from what Weber and Finger termed “VH101,” young people lack crucial cultural literacy such that the revelations in the new Netflix documentary series aka Charlie Sheen might seem shocking. 

But if the media landscape were functioning properly, such young people could get the gist of Charlie Sheen — famous dad, famous wife, famous drug problem, “tiger blood,” etc. — from a four-minute VH1 segment built around a few wisecracks from Rachael Harris and Hal Sparks, and we all could have been spared this three-hour walk-through on one of the least compelling “entertainers” of our time.

Despite aka Charlie Sheen’s attempts to convince us of his middle-class upbringing in *checks notes* Malibu, Sheen — son of acclaimed actor Martin Sheen — was a beneficiary of nepotism before the now-played-out term “nepo baby” had even been coined. Platoon, in which he played his first starring role, won a Best Picture Oscar, and he quickly followed that by re-teaming with writer-director Oliver Stone for Wall Street, another critical and commercial hit. Sheen went on to huge success in the Major League and Hot Shots film franchises. His disordered substance use (primarily alcohol and cocaine, in the 1990s; eventually crack) occurred around and amid these successes, but after a later rehab stint in 1998, Sheen sought out the steady pace of a sitcom, and replaced Michael J. Fox on Spin City after Fox went public with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. That run was followed by Two and A Half Men, a ratings juggernaut that eventually made him — at $2 million per episode — the highest-paid star in TV history. 

To hear Sheen tell it, the pressure of headlining such a huge hit was more than he could take. Though he was mostly sober by then, he “negotiated” with himself to seek painkiller prescriptions for ailments he now says could have probably managed with Advil and ice. It’s not for me to judge how Sheen handled himself in this period; addiction is a disease, and it’s probably impossible for anyone, including Sheen himself, to identify a single cause for his decline. But what aka Charlie Sheen effectively conveys — intentionally or not — is how exhausting it can be dealing with someone in an actively self-destructive spiral: going in circles means passing the same signposts over and over again. 

In the doc, we hear multiple different versions of how badly Sheen was doing in his last days at Men: co-star Jon Cryer was frustrated that Sheen had started visibly decompensating on shoot days; showrunner Chuck Lorre had to make accommodations; Sheen’s then-wife Denise Richards describes raising concerns with people around Sheen, who ignored her because they gained financially from his continuing to work. Finally, Sheen’s behavior could no longer be sanctioned, whereupon Lorre fired Sheen and shut down the production. 

The benefit afforded the average addict is that their spiral isn’t photographed by paparazzi, obsessively covered on TMZ, and used to launch a nationwide tour that, for some reason, was taken seriously as an entertainment event and not as an alarming public meltdown. Sheen, of course, talks about the 100 days of this manic period — how sorry he is for what he put his loved ones through, and how being forced to watch footage from that time gives him “the shame shivers.” 

But why don’t we hear more about the tacit approval Sheen was getting for all this acting-out by the “friends” around him? Did filmmaker Andrew Renzi seek comment from anyone at Live Nation who was involved in putting on the tour? There’s a certain segment of the population that has seen a lot of the admirable acting work Sheen has done but still thinks of the “Winning!!!” era first when his name comes up. This period deserved at least as much screen time as Sheen’s early Super 8 movies, and a lot more investigation. (I personally would have just excised Sean Penn’s interview footage entirely to give it over to the tour; if there’s anyone I don’t need trying to redeem a terrible man, it’s him.)

Even in the segments where Renzi is specifically seeking never-before-heard revelations, his deficiencies as a filmmaker are revealed. Sheen categorically re-denies claims by Corey Feldman that Sheen raped Feldman’s late friend Corey Haim when Sheen and Haim starred in Lucas together; Sheen is the only one asked about it for the doc. When it comes to various former partners’ allegations that Sheen exposed them to HIV — Sheen revealed in 2015 that he is HIV-positive — Sheen denies that too. We don’t hear from any of these former partners to confirm or deny his assertions. 

We already heard last week that when Sheen was still using crack and experiencing “hypersexuality” as a result, he had sex with men. In the doc, Sheen exclusively refers to it as ordering from “the other side of the menu”; Renzi has to ask him the clarifying question, “So this is the first time you’re speaking publicly about having sex with men?” just to get it on the record. Despite Sheen going on to brag that anyone who would refuse to hire him because of this isn’t someone he wants to work with anyway, or note that admitting it didn’t cause anyone to come in and shoot him, I’m not sure he should be marching in any Pride parades quite yet. Even this, arguably the doc’s biggest scoop, is kept from being compelling with Sheen’s euphemistic framing. 

The documentary’s biggest deficit — other than being so implicitly authorized that Sheen knows and comments on the fact that neither Estevez nor their father Martin agreed to participate — is that it’s dropped the day after the publication of Sheen’s memoir, The Book of Sheen. This isn’t meant to be a searching investigation into an elusive figure; it’s promo for a book by a middling ex-actor whose countless personal crises have played out in public for decades. Though I’m happy for Sheen and his family that he’s doing better now than when he was making headlines in the early ‘10s, getting reacquainted with this obnoxious troll over one-eighth of a day didn’t feel like “Winning!!!” for me. 

Four minutes on vintage VH1 — maybe just three — would have been lots.