Who Watches Two and a Half Men?

I bit the bullet on Monday. I watched Two and a Half Men. I was tired of hearing how awful it was and I wanted to see for myself.

And sadly, it lived up to the hype. The awful hype. It is really, really bad. Like, unequivocally bad.

I know it's cliche to trash the show but I was actually pretty surprised. Because many years ago, I wrote a Two and a Half Men spec script. And when you do that, you have to watch the show a lot and kind of study it. While I recognized that it perhaps wasn't for me, I didn't think it was that bad.

So when I say now that it's garbage, it's coming from a place of comparison. I saw it before, and was okay with it. It's gotten worse, a lot worse.

I'm also not a big fan of it's bizarro sitcom opposites - Community and 30 Rock, two single camera fast paced shows with "hip" references. I'm not some champion of that. I like a good ol' fashioned 3 camera sitcom as much as the next hick, if it is done right.

But this shit, jesus. Here was the plot of the episode I saw:

The half man finds out that Ashton Kutcher (a handsome billionaire. Aren't all billionaires on TV handsome? You don't see too many ugly billionaires in fiction) dropped out of high school. So the kid, who is stupid, like Woody Boyd level stupid, decides he's gonna drop out of high school too because he must be too smart for it.

Now, that's fine, I guess. But taking a step back, the other premise that is ongoing is that Ashton's billionaire character has bought the house from Charlie (who "died"), and is now allowing Charlie's brother and son to live there with him.

In what world does this make any logical sense. You think Mark Zuckerberg has some stranger roommates living with him? I must've missed that part of the Social Network.

But let's move on, it's stupid to get caught up in sitcom logic. After all, this is also a world where Jon Cryer has a full head of hair.

The real question is: who is watching this show? It's the most watched comedy on TV, so someone is. Who? Old people? No, it does pretty well in the 18-49 demographic.

Is it the fly over people we always pretend to care about?

Is it you?

Is it CBS? Is the network so popular that people just kind of gravitate towards it no matter what is on?

Is it the same people who kept According to Jim on for 20 seasons? Did they pickup that unserved audience?

Is it the comedy competition? A lot of people don't want to work so hard when watching comedy, like you have to do with Community. Sorry, not all of us are picking up on your Flowers For Algernon references, nor do we want to. We're all glad you're so clever, but how about sprinkling in a few jokes and characters we could give two shits about?

It's probably some combination of all of these.

But I think this Ashton deal is worse than people realize. The show was acceptable with Charlie Sheen, it made sense. The premise was simple and somewhat relatable. Now it's in crazy land. The Ashton fix wasn't a fix at all. It's fatally flawed.

So here's my fearless prediction: the ratings will start falling this year. Not in a huge way, but a fall. And next season they will collapse, and the show will end. Because what I saw on Monday wasn't a show with a Kirstie Alley kick in the pants, I saw a show that was running on fumes. Bearded, beautiful fumes.