The “what will Charlie Sheen do next?” rumours have begun popping up more frequently lately. Translated, this probably means Charlie Sheen is starting to notice that most people don’t care about him any more, and that the longer he’s not on TV the less people care about him, and so he’s trying to keep himself in the news somehow. Hence the items at TMZ and elsewhere about Sheen taking meetings, signing to do an unnamed new sitcom for an unnamed (but totally not nonexistent) network, and so on.
The “what will Charlie Sheen do next?” rumours have begun popping up more frequently lately. Translated, this probably means Charlie Sheen is starting to notice that most people don’t care about him any more, and that the longer he’s not on TV the less people care about him, and so he’s trying to keep himself in the news somehow. Hence the items at TMZ and elsewhere about Sheen taking meetings, signing to do an unnamed new sitcom for an unnamed (but totally not nonexistent) network, and so on.
But finally we have an actual press release about an actual, confirmed television appearance, one that puts Charlie Sheen in such august company as Donald Trump and Bob Saget – he’s going to get his own Comedy Central Roast. Proving, once again, that Charlie wants to be Dean Martin but is doing it wrong: you’re supposed to roast other people, not sit back and let others do it, man.
The scheduling of the event has been calculated to put it on the same night as Ashton Kutcher’s debut on Sheen’s old show, but because Comedy Central shows these things at 10, it won’t be going up against it directly – which is probably just as well. (Lots of people will tune in to see how Charlie is killed off, though I would expect the ratings to fall off tremendously after that; Kutcher may be too familiar a TV presence – even now, because That ’70s Show is in reruns a lot – to create a rush of excitement at his return to the medium.) They’ll come on at 10, after Sheen’s character has been killed off, and make jokes about that. It’s actually too bad they’re not doing it live, since that would allow them to joke directly about what happened to Charlie; that I would tune in to see. It would be like McLean Stevenson turning up on The Carol Burnett Show (which was taped, but closer to the air date) after he was killed off on M*A*S*H, in a sketch showing that Henry Blake was still alive and drifting in the ocean after being shot down.