So What Do We Do With Charlie Sheen?

More accurately, since Sheen has been fired from Two and a Half Men, what do we do with his character, Charlie Harper? Sitcoms face the issue of missing stars, although most are unexpected deaths like Coach on Cheers or Phil Hartman on News Radio. You do what you can and move on. It’s usually a tasteful, wistful episode with as much class as the producers, writers, and cast can muster.

But there’s no class here, and there’s no chance of a tasteful exit. This sacking is wrapped in insanity, parties, drugs, porn, blood oaths, and the star is not yet dead (though he’s trying). What choices do the producers have? Spleened believes there’s two choices:

Switch Your Dicks

Just replace him with a new actor and look the other way.

Everyone knows there’s two Darrins from Bewitched. The first Darrin, Dick York, got addicted to painkillers prescribed for an old back injury, collapsed on the set, and resigned from his hospital bed eight years into the show. Dick Sargent took over for the next couple of years, but he’s the Darrin we remember  since the bulk of the Dick York episodes were black and white and didn’t make syndication.

Unfortunately, in our case, there’s no available, lovable psychopath available to take over. Who comes close?

• David Arquette. Psychopath, yes, but he’s creepy. The fact is nobody likes him much.
• John Stamos. Rumored, then confirmed not to be the replacement. But he’s a nice guy — that explains his lack of steady work (and probably missing out on this).
• Scott Baio. He’s the Nice Guy on screen, but in reality, he’s the genuine article. He’s banged just about everybody in Hollywood, including Sheen’s ex-wife.
• Rob Lowe. Here we go! The rep is there, and not by accident — he’s practically family to the Sheens. So that probably means he won’t do it.
• Rahm Emanuel. Would need some hair dye. And he’s otherwise employed.
• Ron Jeremy. There’s always ‘taking the show in new directions’…it keeps the porn angle intact…

Drop a Bridge on Him

Referring to Captain Kirk’s inauspicious exit in Star Trek: Generations, the next choice is to kill off Sheen’s character. The ‘Spleen personally support this option, but you have to do it right.

He wouldn’t be the first killed in a row with producers. Edith Bunker was stroked out of “Archie Bunker’s Place”, between the first and second season, owing to the fact Jean Stapleton (rightly) felt the spinoff to the original “All In the Family” was just milking the franchise. The golden example is Henry Blake on MASH — McLean Stevenson wanted out, and in return, they crashed his plane on the way home from Korea. Now, the shows went on…remember, they even killed Valerie off of Valerie and it went on for another 3 years (unfortunately)…

But this isn’t just any little argument with management. This is a daily, batshit-flinging, tiger blood-drinking, machete waving descent into the burning embers of flat-out, on-all-fours crazy. So, this exit needs to make television history. A ‘very special episode’. Remember Nancy Reagan told us to ‘Just Say No to Drugs’ on Diff’rent Strokes? How about Tom Hanks playing the alcoholic cousin on ‘Family Ties’? This offing needs to have a message:

Charlie Harper dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

This can be the “don’t hang yourself by accident while jerking off in the closet” episode. I realize Law & Order: SVU has probably worn the motif thin, but this is new ground on a sitcom. Imagine the lives that would be saved. Imagine the ratings. Imagine the surprise that it wasn’t John Cryer’s character.

And as for the producers, imagine re-defining exactly how much of a bitch payback really is.

Now, the show can’t go too far after that, but really, was there any real chance of making it much further the way things are going? When the conductor of your money train is, at best, an unstable, drug-fueled egomaniac teetering on the edge of full-on psychosis — it should come as no surprise he might derail it into a canyon.

The only downside of doing it this way: what if Sheen beats them to it?