Here's the article:

HEADLINE: A new year, a new opportunity for Charlie Sheen to be a better man
SUBHEAD: Shambolic life of Two and a Half Men star offers better entertainment than his lame sitcom

By Ken Hegan

Ah, January. I love this time of year: Christmas trees are piled in the alley. There's a brisk nip in the air. A minute more daylight. And almost like clockwork, Charlie Sheen has been arrested again for drunk, lewd, or violent behaviour.

If you're not aware of this great actor's oeuvre, Charlie Sheen is the star of the Unfunniest Show in the History of Television. A CBS abomination called Two and a Half Men, it's about a rich, drunk tail-chasing jingle writer in Malibu named Charlie (guess who) who wears bowling shirts and rolls his eyes at his uptight brother Alan (that Ducky chump from John Hughes' Pretty in Pink).

When Alan's wife ditches him, he moves into Charlie's beach house where they bicker like ugly girls. Together they endure the loser's dumb doughy son, a.k.a. the Half in the show's title. The show's tagline reads: 'Two Adults, One Kid, No Grown-Ups'.

Have you seen this foul cloud of stink? Somebody has. It's been killing smiles for six and a half (!) seasons now and has been renewed for two more. It's been nominated for 30 Emmys and two Golden Globes, some of which it has even won, and consistently ranks in Nielsen's top 20 shows. According to Nielsen, Two and a Half Men attracts 15 million viewers each week. Even if 15 million people watch it, hate it, and vow to never watch again, the following week a fresh 15 million people line up so they can experience the same shame.

And yet NOBODY I've met has ever admitted to seeing it. Is it possible that they've all collectively forgotten watching Two and a Half Men? Doubt it. I think you'd remember watching something that is this godawful. I know I have and I can't scrape the memory off my brain.

I'll say it right now: Two and a Half Men is about as funny as a dead baby. [Translation: not very.]

Instead of bringing you joy, Two and a Half Men leaches entertainment value from your life. You could be at a theatre tonight, marveling at Avatar on the silver screen. But if you watched Two and a Half Men earlier this week, suddenly in the middle of your dazzling 2.5-hour cinematic experience you will become inexplicably listless and sad. Your endorphins drop; your genitals shrink. Your heart sinks and you weep uncontrollably into both hands. Lost in 30 straight minutes of grey gloom, you miss the best part of Avatar, when the no-legged human sleeps with the pretty blue animal. It's just not worth it.

I'll give you an example of so-called humour on Two and Half Men. It's early afternoon in modern day Los Angeles. Charlie stumbles sleepy-eyed and hungover into the living room of his cliffside Malibu home. So far, no different from a normal afternoon in Charlie Sheen's life. But in this situationally comedic episode, Charlie's uptight brother is practicing ventriloquism with a freaky looking dummy. And then the next thing that happens... Is absolutely nothing.

The official synopsis for this episode reads: 'Charlie is angry when Alan and Chelsea become good friends.' That's it. No mention of the dummy and he has no influence in the plot. A shame because his acting is twice as good as Charlie Sheen's.

Here's another episode synopsis: 'Chelsea is jealous when Charlie's ex fiancé, Mia, calls him.'

Those aren't plots. These are barely scenes, and shockingly lame ones at that. Unlike every other TV show that has to string a number of ideas and plot twists together to make half an hour, Two and a Half Men takes one bad idea, pounds it flat and thin, stretches it into 22 minutes, slaps a disturbingly hysterical laugh track on it, and calls it an episode. So far, they've done this 150 times. It's absolute larceny.

Well I'm not putting up with it anymore. It stops here. My resolution: invent a way to make Two and a Half Men funny.

Idea 1:
Fire the kid and replace him with literally half a man ... a man who is cut in half down his middle. This half man has to hop around everywhere, bleeding from his gaping wound. And maybe crank up the laugh track when he occasionally slips in his own blood.

Idea 2:
Replace the kid with Alf. Why not? As we all know, Alf loves to eat cats. So to make it interesting, keep Charlie Sheen's character exactly the same as he is now, except make him a rich drunk cat and hilarity ensues. I'd watch that.

Idea 3:
What the hell: cancel it and just bring Alf back. That was funny as hell. I'd watch Alf do anything.

Idea 4:
If all else fails, CBS should just scrap the scripts and follow Charlie Sheen around with a camera crew. Gold, Jerry, gold.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the first week in the new year is a time of rebirth and renewal. New Year's is a second chance for all of us...and in Charlie Sheen's case, if he ever gets out of jail he should have his 134th second chance to be a better man, too. Essentially, it comes to this, my friends: if we can rehabilitate this TV show, we can do anything. We could even rehabilitate Charlie Sheen.

Special to the Sun

-- A 3-time National Magazine Award winning writer, Ken Hegan is a billionaire playboy who solves baffling crimes in his spare time.