It seemed inevitable that FX would renew Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management for another 90 episodes after its initial run this summer, which no matter how much I hated it, found an audience (though not as big an audience as the initial announcement of it seemed to suggest was necessary for a renewal). Now that it’s happened, I’m resigned and more than a little sad. But if FX is going to continue to make money off of Sheen, here are five interesting—and even a few redemptive—things it could invest that cash in.

1. A female anti-hero drama, preferably starring C.C.H. Pounder: Glenn Close’s legal drama Damages didn’t quite work out on FX, which has since retrenched its brand as a dude-heavy network, though its Cold War drama The Americans, starring Kerri Russell, should help a little on that score. If FX is going to go lowest-common denominator on content with Anger Management and give Sheen a continuing platform and advertising dollars to rehabilitate his public image, they should reinvest the profits in helping the anti-hero genre grow and giving a woman a similar platform and career boost. C.C.H. Pounder did amazing work for the network on The Shield. FX should consider bringing her back.

2. A show about a man trying to grapple with his abuse of women: One of the grosser things about Anger Management is the way it’s reduced—and so much of the show is a meta-reappropriation of Sheen’s real-life personality—Sheen’s mistreatment of women to cheating and callousness, smoothing over his record of physical violence towards them. In the run-up to Anger Management, FX suggested the show could be about a man grappling with his treatment of women. If the network made that show, made it about a man with a history of abusing, and genuinely confronted repentance, violence, and control, it would be a landmark show.

3. A Louie-style low budget show from a woman or a person of color: In the wake of Girls’ debut on HBO this spring, there was an enormous discussion about the absence of women and people of color as television creators. That conversation, as is often the case with these things, has died down somewhat, but it shouldn’t go away. “John Landgraf wanted to let you know that the door is open for you to come to FX anytime and do the same show Louie does in your own version,” FX’s press guru John Solberg told Chris Rock at the Television Critics Association Press tour this summer. “So you are welcome to come.” The network should get serious about that invitation, but not just to Rock.

4. A genre show: With Game of Thrones, HBO’s found an awesome story engine to put dragons and zombies on-screen—and also to stage big, long discussions about gender and violence. FX has looked at adapting the comic Powers, about two cops who investigate crimes involving superheros, for television, and if that doesn’t work, it should look forward with an eye towards the fact that genre shows aren’t just about the special effects—they’re about issues, too.

5. A story about a male-dominated culture from the perspectives of women: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with FX’s core brand being shows about masculinity, a theme that’s produced a lot of interesting television. But the secret of Sons of Anarchy is that the show is at its best when it’s exploring biker life through the perspective of its old ladies, Gemma Teller, Tara Knowles, and Lyla Winston. That’s a formula FX could use to keep its identity while moving female characters to the center of the frame more frequently. And done right, it could mean the network gets shows about how different masculinities affect women.

In January, John Landgraf, the president of FX, told the assembled writers at the Television Critics Association Press Tour why he’d decided to give Charlie Sheen a half-hour comedy, in which Sheen would star as an “unconventional anger management therapist.” “I think if Charlie wants to get his house in order, and that includes his issues with substance abuse and his relationships to his own family, it also encompasses his desire to have greater consciousness about his public persona,” he said. “[His character] is struggling to foster for a daughter a positive self-esteem and sense of how to be a woman in society. My opinion is that could be a really good thing. That could be a good thing for Charlie, it could be a good thing for society.”

When I talked to Landgraf after the session to clarify why he’d decided to work with Sheen, given Sheen’s record of violence against women and repeated relapses, he had this to say:

Part of what the show is about, frankly, is a kind of comeuppance. For example, he has a teenaged daughter, he has an ex-wife, his ex-wife has questionable tastes in men, and he was the first of her questionable tastes in men. But now, as a co-parent, he has to deal with a series of men in his 13-year-old daughter’s life, and that’s a kind of comeuppance for him. I can’t know what’s in Charlie Sheen’s heart. I can only tell you that as an artist and as a performer, he made a choice in terms of what he chose to do next that to me is indicative of somebody who wants to grow, and he wants to play a more self-aware, more dimensional character, and he wants to make a more complicated, more nuanced show.

I think you and [Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan] imagine that some of the same things that happened in the past will probably happen in the future, and therefore in your estimation, I’ve stepped into the role of an enabler that was exited by others like Warner Brothers and CBS. And in my estimation, we make a really good show and Charlie grows as a human being…

I don’t lack empathy or sympathy for [Maureen]‘s point of view. But my point of view is I’m not Charlie’s judge, jury, and executioner. I’m not ready to declare him someone who should be banished forever from the public eye and from his work. If he’d come in and indicated no interest and ambition in progressing his work on-camera as well as no ambition to progress his life than I wouldn’t have chosen to get involved with it.

I quote Landgraf at such length here, because I think it’s important that people be clear on what FX said about Anger Management before it premieres tonight. It might have been one thing for FX to have baldly admitted that they signed up Charlie Sheen because they thought that even though his behavior was heinous and the pitch was not even close to their creative standards, they thought he would make a lot of money that would let them support their other programming.They could have even tried to sell the show as a solid but unremarkable sitcom. But instead they said “it could be a good thing for society.” That the pitch was “indicative of somebody who wants to grow…and make a more complicated, more nuanced show.” Sheen himself told Playboy “I’m done playing a drunken, womanizing, immature character. This time I’m playing an adult.” Networks always talk up their new shows. But the gap between the spin that Landgraf gave me and other critics to convince us to give Anger Management a chance and the reality of the show they’ve produced is unusually striking.

The two episodes of television they’re airing tonight suggest one of three options. First, that the spin was always nothing but spin. Second, the episodes that were turned in didn’t live up to the hopes that Landgraf had for the show. Third, and scariest, that they think the episodes they’re kicking off the season with are reflective of those high standards. That option is particularly frightening, given that the second episode of Anger Management is one of the ugliest, most callously sexist things I’ve ever seen on television.
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A year ago, when Charlie Sheen was melting down for fun and profit on his post-Two and a Half Men tour, Rolling Stone wrote this about him:

Staring failure in the face and calling it “winning” — that’s the closest thing we have to an American religion. It’s the native tradition, from Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick to Ron Burgundy in Anchorman. And if that’s our religion, Charlie Sheen is our Vatican assassin warlock. Lots of us can look back on ruined lives, lost jobs, squandered fortunes. But to look back on it all and shrug, “I’m tired of pretending I’m not a total bitchin’ frickin’ rock star from Mars”? That’s up there with Ahab threatening to strike the sun if it insults him.

Now, in the same magazine’s pages, in a Q&A that’s out in print today and that I’m looking forward to getting my hands on, he’s singing a rather different tune: “Clearly, a guy gets fired, his relationships are in the toilet, he’s off on some fucking tour, there’s nothing ‘winning’ about any of that. I mean, how does a guy who’s obviously quicksanded, how does he consider any of it a victory? I was in total denial.” Of course, he also says “I mean, the shit works. Sorry, but it works. Anyway, I don’t see what’s wrong with a few drinks. What’s your drink? Tequila? Mine’s vodka. Straight, because I’ve always said that ice is for injuries, ha ha.” And this week, he melted down, cursing out a security guard at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

I remain curious to see Sheen’s new show, Anger Management, if only to see if FX president John Landgraf, who said he accepted the pitch because he was convinced Sheen wanted to reexamine his life and his relationships with women, is right. But there is something wearying about this kind of cycle: a fall from grace, a spectacular burnout, a withdrawal, and a reemergence. As with Britney Spears’ return to music-making, touring, and now acting as a judge on the X Factor, Sheen’s semi-contrition tour feels like recovery as a product, as a means of restoring the value of a profitable franchise. I’m queasy about the repackaging of the wrenching, non-linear processes that are recovery and reinvention into a consumable format.

Via Entertainment Weekly:

If FX was mildly nervous that Charlie Sheen’s public persona may affect his chances for a comeback, this information should come as a huge relief: EW has learned that test audiences who saw the pilot of his new comedy Anger Management recently were both pleased with his new half-hour comedy and eager to see the 46-year-old actor succeed in a new series.

The majority of men and women who attended a screening of the half-hour comedy in California’s San Fernando Valley last week rated the multi-camera pilot favorably, while over 80 percent gave Sheen an enthusiastic thumbs-up for his performance as an unorthodox therapist, according to one well-placed source. The pilot that also features the comeback of Brett Butler as a bartender played even better among women in the 18-34 and 18-49 demographic.

Overall, testing groups indicated that while they were well aware of Sheen’s fall from grace at CBS, they were still excited about his comeback and actually rooting for him to succeed, the source said. Some respondents even went so far as to say they were happy to see the actor in good health.

I’m open to, though skeptical of, the idea that I’ll like Anger Management. But I’m genuinely curious: does anyone have a theory about why people feel so charitably towards Charlie Sheen in particular? I know people like redemption narratives in general, but we also sure seem to relish kicking certain people when they’re down. I’d love a Sheen-specific explanation, especially since there’s no performance that makes me desperately long for him to return to former glory.

Guess we’ll have to wait for a longer cut to see more of that long-touted journey towards redemption and self-reflection:

I get that this is a riff on how Charlie Harper was killed off on Two and a Half Men. But it also inadvertently reveals how silly it is to suggest that this is any sort of grand comeback narrative. Charlie Sheen has made too much money for too many people for him ever to have to struggle to find work if he wants it.

In his Today show appearance with Matt Lauer last week, Charlie Sheen revealed something interesting about the terms of his new show, Anger Management, which is in development for FX. Apparently, his contract includes what Deadline is calling a “standard morals clause” because, as Sheen put it “There’s so much money at stake, I don’t blame them.”

If that’s the case, it means that FX is holding Sheen to a higher standard of behavior as a condition of his continued employment than CBS may have. When Sheen was fired from his network hit Two and a Half Men, one of the major issues in negotiating the terms of his dismissal was the unusual morals clause in his contract that stipulated he could only be terminated if Warner Brothers television believed he’d committed a felony. A standard morals clause normally gives a network much more latitude, saying that an actor can be fired if they behave in a way that brings negative attention to a show.

Given Sheen’s behavior, it seems appropriate that, even given his status as a big draw, he’d be held to the same standards as his fellow actors. FX president John Landgraf may not be able to define what sort of actions or behavior would make him consider an actor unemployable. But at least he’s giving himself wide latitude to fire this one.