Two And A Half Men Season 9

So does anybody actually like this season? I know it was doing well in the ratings, but i've read dozens of negative reviews on sites like TV.com and as painful as it is for me to admit, I have to agree with them. This used to be one of my favorite shows, it never failed to make me laugh my ass off, but now i'm lucky if I get even a few mild chuckles from an episode. Season 9 is Two And A Half Men In Name Only, everything has changed for the worse, Walden is a really flat and uninteresting character who's little more then a rich version of Alan, he's in no way a competant replacement for Charlie, I don't blame Ashton Kutcher as he's really trying, but he's given lousy material to work with as is almost everyone else. The Flanderization is just ridiculous, Alan is still a worthless mooch and has become incredibly slimy and unlikeable to the point that now he's basically Charlie without any of the humor, Jake does almost nothing but smoke pot and he's come down with the worst case of The Ditz syndrome i've ever seen, Rose has become a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, like killing Charlie wasn't bad enough(spekaing of which, couldn't the writers have come up with a better way of getting rid of him? Just say he ran off or something)now she's training another woman in the art of stalking, Lindsay has become much crazier, Berta's about the only one who hasn't changed for the worse. Also the new supporting characters are completely listless, Walden's ex-wife and his girlfriend Zoey(who's basically nothing but a walking punchline for really lame British jokes) and on top of that the tone is completely different, there's now WAAAYYYYYYY TOO much emphasis on Toilet Humor("Not In My Mouth" made me more nauseous then all of the Saw films combined)several of the supporting characters like Judith and Herb haven't appeared for some reason, and most of the character interactions feel forced and unnatural, which makes it difficult to care about any of the characters(plus the new sets look awful), this show has gone so far downhill that I can't even see the top anymore, unless Sheen somehow returns, I can't see how this show could possibly get better, say what you want about him as a person, but he was the glue that held the show together, without him there is no TAAHM, just a pale imitation.

There is one bright spot though, the last episode had the lowest ratings of the entire series by far(11.92 to be exact, a 17 million drop from the premiere) and if the ratings keep slipping when the show returns in a few weeks, Lorre will most likely have to either bring Charlie back next season and Retcon his death in order to boost the ratings(which wouldn't be hard, the body was never found, just say Rose faked his death and kept him in the basement to keep him away from other women, or just do the whole It Was All A Dream thing, I doubt anyone's going to miss Walden anyways) or continue the show down the same path and risk cancellation due to low ratings.

edited 1st Mar '12 12:48:50 PM by darkrage6

I just don't like the blatant amount of Ho Yay. There forcing it down our throats and its neither funny nor clever.

We should program everyone who watches this show to shoot themselves, Videodrome-style.

Better yet, they should program all viewers to letterbomb Chuck Lorre's mailbox.

Agree about the Ho Yay, the "Alan is gay" joke has been throughly beaten to death this season, and what's with all the male nudity all of a sudden? Seems like a desperate attempt to attract female viewers. I'm also getting really tired of the constant Take Thats against Sheen, it comes across as really petty and immature of Lorre. So what if Sheen used Chuck's middle name? That seems like a half-assed excuse to fire him. I say Chuck should either get over it and bring Sheen back or put this poor show out of it's misery. Kutcher is a talented actor, but he is just not lead material, especially with a character as poorly written as Walden Schmidt, nothing about him makes any sense, he's supposedly a self-made billionaire yet he acts like a 12-year old all the time and hardly seems to do any actual work, and for some reason he feels the need to constantly get nude and talk about his genitals, WTF? I never thought i'd say this, but season 9 is actually making me nostalgic for seasons 3 and 4 of Heroes.

Yeah I share that sentiment too. I liked the other seasons, mainly because Sheen held it together, but also with very strong and funny side characters.

When I saw the first episode of this ninth season, I quickly made up my mind not to watch the rest of it, and clearly I was right. Already the character had become caricatures of themselves by the eighth season (some of them way before that, Jake in particular) but I'm not surprised it has worsened in this one.

Not to deviate too much from the subject, but this seems to affect other Chuck Lorre shows as well. I haven't watched much of Big Bang Theory's latest season but I really didn't like what little I saw. Already by season four I was loosing interest, but season five seems to be what I had feared from season three onwards : permanent Sheldon-fest with all the other characters becoming one-note versions of themselves (Raj always obsessed with sex, Leonard constantly "tired" and just shrugging off every situation with a "really ?" look on his face, etc...). The only one I can still remotely enjoy in this mess is Simon Helberg who still has shining moments of awesome (being generally snarky) but he seems to have less and less screen time as the series progresses.

I could never really get into Big Bang Theory, the main characters all seemed to be extreme nerd sterotypes cranked Up To Eleven, which I didn't find funny.

edited 2nd Mar '12 1:23:06 AM by darkrage6

Well to be honest I found the first season really good. Sheldon wasn't so obsessive compulsive about everything, and the other characters still had personnality. They also used to (or at least attempt) to play the characters like they were actual friends, rather than being constantly annoyed at each other all the time like it is now. It's sad because the cast went from having good on-screen chemistry (in the first and second season, mostly) to looking like they couldn't stand each other. I even wondered why Leonard and Sheldon are still in the same building at one point.

It's kind of the same with Two and a Half Men, but less disturbing : at the beginning they were searching for what the characters' personnalities were like, so they tried different things, but when they found a formula that worked in terms of ratings, they just settled on it and never moved ever. I just happened to enjoy the formula used from season 3 to 8 of T&AHM much more than the formula they started to use about late-season 2 onwards in TBBT.

And I'm kind of puzzled at what you said in the first post. The show, even if it wasn't incredible, still was at least a little entertaining, and had amazing ratings, I don't get why they would completely turn it around just because of the death of the primary character : why couldn't the other characters keep the same persona as before ? It clearly worked in terms of audience, I don't see why they would change that. Or they're deliberately trying to make it look like it is completely bad without Charlie Sheen, but really it could have been allright. Sure he held the show together, but Alan was still relatively well written (and I think Jon Cryer is genuinely funny), and there were possibilities, they could have done so much, and apparently did very little. Another ball dropping from Lorre & co.

edited 3rd Mar '12 9:28:02 AM by Akalabth

Well part of the reason it's stumbled so badly is that Walden just dosen't play off any of the characters as well as Charlie did. Cryer is still occasionally funny(like in one episode where he started acting like Charlie, that one was pretty decent since Walden was hardly in it, but of course Chuck just couldn't resist throwing in that "winning" comment at the end, no Chuck you're LOSING!) and he looks like he's really trying his best with the material, but try as he might he just can't carry the show by himself.

It seems like the writers just don't know what to do with most of the characters, hence characters like Judith and Herb not appearing so far and characters like Jake barely appearing at all in most episodes(and even being completely absent in one episode to focus on Zoey). TAAHM could've still worked without Sheen if it was handled better, like if Alan inherited the house from Charlie and he completed his transition to the "dark side" that was hinted at in Season 8, that might actually be interesting to watch, or they could've had Kutcher's character be a long lost cousin of Charlie's or something similar, that would've at least made sense, but having an eccentric billionaire suddenly decide to move in with Alan feels incredibly contrived and half-assed. My guess is Lorre was so focused on proving he could do well without Charlie that he didn't put much thought into the writing process, he cut off his nose to spite his face.