How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Rules of Engagement | CBS
Two and a Half Men is the most brutal of the bunch. It’s about two brothers whose contrasting sufferings reveal the fundamental hell of American masculinity. One brother, Charlie (Charlie Sheen), is a “typical guy”–which is to say he’s a raging horndog who spends every waking moment pursuing, bedding, and discarding a succession of gorgeous women. The other brother, Alan (Jon Cryer), is Charlie’s opposite–he’s a failed horndog, basically a doofus, who spends every waking moment longing for, and striking out with, gorgeous women. He has to settle for bedding female doofuses and is perpetually hoping that they’re secretly slutty. Only they keep turning out to be, in Charlie’s courteous words, “crazy bitches.”
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It might be almost charming if the story lines weren’t such slack, stupid exercises in post-Seinfeld absurdism–the producers have forgotten, or aren’t capable of following, the Seinfeld rule that this kind of surrealist plotting must look as rigorously logical as a Restoration farce. (If you knew you were due in court, why would you agree to a job interview in another city on the same day?) But the deeper problem is that underneath the cheeriness is an unarticulated horror: the show is really about the psychopathology of the nice guy. Ted might seem harmless and goofy, but deep down he’s a doofus version of Raging Bull.
