Angus T. Jones, Ashton Kutcher, and John Cryer of ‘Two and a Half Men’
Some interesting Man Bites Dog and the Hand That Feeds Him cultural news: a teenage member of the main cast of the CBS TV sitcom Two and a Half Men—I suspect that he is the half man referred to in the show’s title—has told people not to watch his show.
In a YouTube video, Angus T. Jones, who plays the teen Jake Harper on the CBS sitcom, tells viewers not to watch the series because it contains “filth.” His comments are part of a religious testimony given to The Forerunner Chronicles.
“If you watch Two and a Half Men, please stop watching Two and a Half Men. I’m on Two and a Half Men. I don’t want to be on it. … Please stop filling your head with filth,” he says just past the 7-minute mark of the video.
He continues: “Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to television and especially with what you watch on the television. It’s bad news. … I don’t know if it means any more coming from me, but you might not have heard it otherwise.”
I have written elsewhere (specifically in the journal Academic Questions) that although the content of Two and a Half Men is indeed a string of dirty jokes, the show does not convey the characters’ bad behavior as admirable or likely to inspire people to think that emulating those choices will lead to good consequences. Of course, the flip side of that is that consistently depicting life as a string of dirty jokes and thus seeming to characterize self-destructive behavior as normal could send people, especially the young, the message that such is the way the world is and it’s unavoidably so, so one shouldn’t even strive to be good.
So I’m probably as ambivalent as most people are regarding the current state of the nation’s culture. I think that moralists who state that the culture is thoroughly evil and has to be reformed by force tend not to understand that showing destructive behavior does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of such activities. I also think that people who blithely tell others “Don’t watch if you don’t like it” ignore the fact that the culture is pervasive and doesn’t affect just me but also ye and he and she. Anybody who cares about their society ought to care about the culture and never cavalierly dismiss its potential effects.
Which brings us back to Mr. Jones. I am impressed that Mr. Jones has the nerve, stubbornness, or stupidity to speak his mind in this way. I hope that that his decision to go public with his worries about his show’s potential effect on it audience will not turn out to be as disastrous as the choices made by the characters in the show. (So far, his bosses have kept their cool, according to ABC’s Good Morning America.) And above all I hope that this incident might get people on both sides of the debate over the state of the culture to consider the importance of understanding both sides of the issue: what cultural products really mean when they show self-destructive and other-destructive behavior, and what the pervasiveness of self-destructive and other-destructive behavior in a culture can do to the ethical sense of their audiences and the society at large.
Here’s the video:
Well said, STK. Yes, the show IS a string of dirty jokes and the characters display arrested development and misogyny on steroids — but the main character on which the show revolved certainly received his comeuppance when he was more than likely pushed from a train platform to his death after found cheating on his gf. And, as noted repeatedly, he was a lonely man — a hound who couldn’t make a commitment (slight attempts were made to pinpoint the source of this on the characters’ mother). For me, most of the above was a morality tale that displayed the downfalls of rampant hedonism despite that said hedonism was played, sometimes hilariously, for laughs and involved the sexual exploitation of, more often than not, flaky young beauties. Many of these women would reappear in later episodes to tell Charlie how he had hurt them. Other women were portrayed as strong, independent, successful — and yet they still fell for the schtick, but ended up dumping him for his lack of maturity. The show jumped the shark for me when the younger brother, Alan, a unrepentant mooch, ran a Ponzi scheme on all those closest to him. This too was played for laughs, but it was anything but funny. Blame the writers or the actor for not pulling it off, or just blame the fact that exploiting those closest to you for financial gain is pretty difficult comedic fodder.
Thanks for your comment, Bruce. The details you add here are very helpful in understanding the show. I wonder about the difference between sophisticated viewers such as yourself, and naive viewers who won’t understand the appalling implications of the characters’ behavior. Perhaps it’s unlikely that many people could fail to see these implications. What is your judgment about the likelihood of that?
Surely this is a joke? This is a TV show….a comedy show…not a documentary…..this insults the intelligence of the veiwing audience and I find this to be patronising in the utmost. These characters exist for 20 some odd minutes to make people forget about the work and their worries for those few minutes. It’s not meant to be taken literally. I worry for the mentality of people who have nothing better to do than to look at the impact a comedy show has on it’s viewers, talk about taking yourself too seriously. Tom never really kills Jerry either guys, Wile.E.Coyote never dies….it’s T.V. If folks can’t understand that then we need to take their T.V’s from them as they are not capable of living in reality.
Terry, with all due respect, all I can say in response to you is that you are not thinking very deeply.
Terry, “…it’s TV. If folks can’t understand that then we need to take their T.V.’s from them as they are not capable of living in reality.” Look up the word “irony” in a dictionary.
Why is it, Terry, that you pretty much never see people smoking on TV like they used to? How come you never see negative portrayals of homosexuality on TV, or movies? Because the mostly liberal people that make these shows believe that what they produce has some kind of effect on the people that watch it, that’s why. Smoking, they believe, is basically a death sentence, so they can’t let all those young and impressionable minds be influenced by sexy cool people smoking on TV. And they believe, by golly, that homosexuality is good and normal and absolutely needs to be accepted and mainstreamed in American culture.
Your view is simply facile and sophomoric. You are not thinking very deeply indeed.
Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical for Jones to continue drawing a paycheck from a show he considers repellent filth? His recommendation to stop watching would carry much more weight if he stopped watching – and participating – first.
Larry, that’s a good question. I imagine that Jones has indeed stopped watching the show, and he is now on hiatus from it until January, as his character has joined the Army.
Jones was nine years old when he began working on the show, and only recently underwent his religious conversion, it seems. He is now bound to the show by contract, and any honorable person will honor a contract. The question now is whether the show’s producers will offer to cancel his contract if he wishes.
If they do so and he does not quit the show, he will indeed be hypocritical–unless he is able to force serious changes in the narratives, which may be highly unlikely. However, with his character joining the Army, it is possible that the show could incorporate some story lines that he and other Christians would consider sufficiently edifying as to justify his resuming participation in the show. This could be done without reducing the show’s appeal to its current audience, I imagine, but I don’t see a lot of upside in the producers going to the trouble to do this–unless they too convert to Christianity, hahaha.
My guess is that the producers will offer an agreement with Jones to leave the show, but there will be a sticking point: their likely desire for a gag clause preventing him from commenting about the show.
I have no inside info about this; this is just what I see as the likely scenario given the motivations of the parties involved in the situation. It’s an interesting story line in itself.
Thanks Sam – I wasn’t aware of any of that (I watched 2.5 Men once for about 1.5 minutes and realized it wasn’t my cup of tea), and it’s a good assessment of how this may turn out. It will be interesting to see what happens to A. Jones in his post-2.5 Men career – will he be ostracized by Hollywood? Continue to speak out? Be part of the very small group of entertainment professionals explicitly trying to create more moral fare (e.g. Kirk Cameron)?
BTW, I agree with your analysis, and in film I think one of the best examples of a movie showing but not endorsing destructive behavior is “Boogie Nights.” On the surface this is all about sex and drugs in the 1970s-80s porn industry, but the second half is a fire and brimstone jeremiad about what happens when you liberate the passions.
This is from the ‘Mark Twain’ article (Nov. 21) here at ‘The American Culture’:
‘Now, I don’t approve of dissipation, and I don’t indulge in it either; but I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices. And so I don’t want to hear from you any more.’
The characters in the show ‘Two and a Half Men’ have these ‘petty vices’, and it is these vices that drive the comedy that makes the show such a success. If the characters behaved ‘morally’ (whatever that means) would it still be funny, and would it have lasted as long as it has? I don’t think so.
S. T. Karnick, when you write,
‘Of course, the flip side of that is that consistently depicting life as a string of dirty jokes and thus seeming to characterize self-destructive behavior as normal could send people, especially the young, the message that such is the way the world is and it’s unavoidably so, so one shouldn’t even strive to be good.’
you are being one of those nosy, politically-correct moralists that Mark Twain was known to despise so much, and when these ‘moralists’ invoke the alleged harm that such influences might (somehow, possibly) have on ‘the young’, I know that the person in question has an agenda in his/her mind to introduce draconian legislation in order to curb the personal freedom that we all cherish to live as dissolute and reckless a life as we see fit.
Peter, you write:
“you are being one of those nosy, politically-correct moralists that Mark Twain was known to despise so much, and when these ‘moralists’ invoke the alleged harm that such influences might (somehow, possibly) have on ‘the young’, I know that the person in question has an agenda in his/her mind to introduce draconian legislation in order to curb the personal freedom that we all cherish to live as dissolute and reckless a life as we see fit.”
You need to learn to read more carefully. Your characterization of my article and of my attitudes is completely wrong and indeed quite foolish. Feel free to try another comment when you understand it.
Another comment (now that I understand it).
Perhaps you are being far more subtle here than I was able to discern, but when you make a statement like the one I quoted you are being excessively preachy.
You fail to realise that it is a comedy show (i.e. fiction), you fail to see that the vast majority of viewers will know this and will therefore also know that ‘life is not a string of dirty jokes’, and you also insult ‘the young’ when you imply that they are too stupid to pick up on these points. You do not define the demographic section of the population you have in mind when using that loaded expression (i.e. ‘the young’ – which age group specifically?) and also fail to define precisely what it is that you mean by the term ‘good’, in your ‘strive to be good’ comment.
It has all too often been the case that whenever a radical social conservative (i.e. Bible-thumper) has had a sinister agenda in mind that they have used the excuse of ‘protecting the young’ (a.k.a. ‘someone think of the children!’) in order to fool the gullible into relinquishing their hard-won personal freedoms. This article of yours is just another example of this.
If enough people refrain from watching a show that they happen to find personally offensive actually decide to practice what they preach, then the show in question will disappear due to low ratings. The advice, ‘if you don’t like it, don’t watch it – turn it off’, is actually sound, because it DOES work.
This reply is a bit better, Peter, but all of your points have already been dealt with above, and your characterization of my arguments and my person remain false and ignorant. Hence I will simply direct readers to the original text of the essay and the comments from others above.