Charlie Sheen Was an All-Powerful Dictator at CBS
The new sprawling, three-hour long documentary about Charlie Sheen, titled aka Charlie Sheen, details the meteoric rise and fall of the actor. It features a lot of Sheen, but it also includes interviews with many people who were in his life throughout the height of his fame, his stints in rehab and during the most severe parts of his addiction.
There’s plenty to dig into across two parts — from his marriages and arrests to the failed interpersonal relationships exacerbated by his chaotic behavior and substance abuse. The second part of the documentary spotlights Sheen’s invincibility with CBS while he was the lead on the sitcom Two and a Half Men. Even after Sheen was arrested for assault in 2009, ratings for the show continued to skyrocket.
A pundit from the time described it like this: “They’d rather not have to put up with Charlie Sheen’s behavior, but they are sort of stuck.”
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Denise Richards recalls a time when then CBS CEO Les Moonves showed up to Sheen’s house at 9 a.m., with the head of Warner Bros. Television with two statements the companies were prepared to release. One would announce that Sheen would go to rehab and then resume filming; the other would announce the cancellation of Two and a Half Men.
Jon Cryer added his own side to the story. He spent all that time watching Sheen leverage his own crisis into more money. “He’s in the midst of falling apart in every way that I can imagine, and he’s renegotiating his contract for another year of a show that I’m supposed to be on too,” Cryer recalled. “Apparently they had pre-sold a couple extra seasons of the show. So it was worth their while to spend this astonishing amount of money on Charlie.”
Sheen said he played a game of telephone between Moonves, Sheen’s lawyer and himself. He kept rejecting offers from Moonves, driving up his price to return to Two and a Half Men. Cryer compared the behavior to Kim Jong-il, the former Supreme Leader of North Korea.
“The dictator of North Korea was a guy named Kim Jong-il,” Cryer explains. “He acted crazy all the time and thus got enormous amounts of aid from countries who were so scared of him that they would shovel money at him. Well, that’s what happened here. His negotiations went off the charts because his life was falling apart.”
I don’t know if that’s a completely historically accurate retelling of what Kim Jong-il was up to, but I do imagine that Cryer has been using that analogy to explain working with Sheen for the better part of 15 years. Also calling a coked-out, felony-committing, former teen heartthrob the Kim Jong-il of CBS is pretty funny.
“Me, whose life was pretty good at that time, I got a third of that,” Cryer recalls.
Well, Jon, you weren’t doing enough crack to euthanize an elephant. Clearly, CBS rewards that kind of behavior. Sheen ended up signing a two-year contract to return to the show for $2 million an episode, making him the highest paid TV star in history.
In this instance, crime did pay.
