Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that Hollywood lacks standards for what acts make someone unemployable. But part of the problem is also that while we have a sense of what behavior we don’t want to see treated as if it’s acceptable, there isn’t a clear standard for what constitutes making amends, not just to the people who were directly harmed by celebrities’ actions or remarks, but to the rest of us who have to deal with those people as public figures.

The way director Brett Ratner’s behaved in the wake of his comments last fall that “rehearsal is for fags,” which lost him a chance to run the Academy Awards, is an instructive example of what celebrity redemption might look like. At the time, he promised that “I will be taking real action over the coming weeks and months in an effort to do everything I can both professionally and personally to help stamp out the kind of thoughtless bigotry I’ve so foolishly perpetuated.” And he’s lived up to that promise, committing to produce a new ad campaign for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It’s an experience that both sounds like it’s been educational for Ratner, and that’s letting an organization that represents the people he offended derive a substantive benefit.

Now, there will always be people who judge someone who’s in the process of redemption. But I think this offers a pretty reasonable standard for deciding if someone should be eligible not just to work, but for career-enhancing slots at an event like the Grammys or a production deal at FX that’s going to require a lot of promotional heavy lifting. Has the person who broke the law or committed the sin against decency educated themselves? And have they made a substantive contribution—whether it’s a donation of their services or raising money for a cause—to make public recompense and reinforce the idea that what they did was wrong, not just for them, but for anyone? If Chris Brown or Charlie Sheen had committed to raising a very serious amount of money for domestic violence charities and followed through on the work, I’d be much more inclined to consider forgiving them. It would be an acknowledgement that they understood that their behavior was wrong, and connected to larger issues in society, and that they were committed to remedying them both.

When the Grammys invited Chris Brown to perform not once but twice during Sunday’s awards show, three years after he plead guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna, the decision sparked outrage—and some good questions. At Ebony, Zerlina Maxwell wants to know if the Grammys think they’re sending a message other than that domestic abuse is no big deal. And the New Yorker’s rock critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, asked “Why forgive Chris Brown so quickly and hang Ike Turner out to dry for so long?” The answer isn’t that the Grammys, or any other institution in Hollywood, have arcane or difficult-to-discern rules about when domestic abusers should be welcomed back and given the platforms they need to make enormous amounts of money. It’s that they don’t have established standards at all, leaving them to handle things on a case-by-case basis that often seems incoherent.

In January, I asked FX President John Landgraf, who is working with Charlie Sheen on a new show called Anger Management, if he thought there was a clear standard for something an actor could do that would make them, in Landgraf’s eyes, unemployable. He told me:

I can’t tell you what that is. But the answer’s clearly yes. You can certainly imagine a performer doing something that renders them unemployable. Again, what is that? I don’t know. And do I hope that won’t take place and believe that probably won’t take place? Yeah. But anybody could do something that would be grounds for termination of a show. How could I define that line? I’m not a lawyer. How could I have a precise list of things and here’s the line and if you’re on this side of the line you’re fine and you’re on that side of the line, you’re not fine? I don’t think that’s theoretically possible.

When it comes to why Landgraf trusts Sheen in particular to star in Anger Management, in which Sheen plays a former baseball player with anger issues whose best friend is a woman, who has a female therapist, and who is raising a daughter as a single father, he said:

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 Mo [Ryan, the television critic at Huffington Post] 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, and we don’t know.

I’d argue that the evidence is fairly clear that Charlie Sheen has a pattern of repeated violence against women who are his intimate partners, and of relapses in his program of recovery, and that perhaps my and Mo’s bet is better than Landgraf’s. But making bets about the future isn’t really the point here. It’s how Hollywood treats past behavior and sends messages about which sins matter, and how much, and which don’t.
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-George Pelecanos on his childhood and why he likes writing not about racists, but about “people who don’t think they have any of those bad feelings.”

-Chuck Lorre is killing off Charlie Sheen.

-It sounds like NBC has absolutely no idea what made Prime Suspect a great show, and has decided instead that it’s cigs and a fedora.

In our discussion about the unattractive behavior of athletes, Dirk Lester asked “How do you think this compares as a dilemma to the deciding whether or not (or how) to consume media created by the likes of Roman Polanski or Charlie Sheen?” It’s a good question, though not one with a simple answer, I think, because of the different power dynamics when an objectionable person is a decision-maker than when they’re a role player. And my calculations here are personal, and not meant to tell anyone else how to watch sports or movies or television.

Charlie Sheen feels to me like a good analogue to how I feel about Albert Haynesworth. Both are objectionable men whose salaries I don’t really want to contribute to. But they also both work with people who don’t have a demonstrable track record of enabling dreadful people. As Saul Tannenbaum wisely pointed out in that same thread, Myra Kraft personally vetoed Christin Peter’s continued membership in the New England Patriots after learning about his extensive and disturbing record of violence against women, and the team released him three days after drafting him. Chuck Lorre has a somewhat difficult reputation, but Sheen aside, he doesn’t seem to have extensively coddled any stars who behaved far outside the bounds of propriety. So I weigh the individuals as exceptions against the overall lived values of the organizations that employ them, and against my affections for the folks who end up having to work with them, who likely don’t get much say in it. It’s not Angus T. Jones’ fault his Two and a Half Men star has a record of violence against women, and it’s not Wes Welker’s fault that Albert Haynesworth once stomped an opponent in the face. In those cases, I can keep watching the Patriots, because I think on balance, the team still shares my values. Fortunately, I don’t care enough about Two and a Half Men to agonize over whether I’m justified in watching it, and most of Sheen’s other work I want to engage with is available through Netflix Instant, where I don’t have to feel like I’m directing additional income in Sheen’s direction.

Polanski feels like a different case to me. I’ve read extensively on the subject, I’m aware of the problems with the trial, but I can’t reconcile myself to the idea that he’s a victim. And I find it fairly distasteful the number of prominent and well-paid actors and actresses who insist on treating him as such, or insist that once you get to know him, he’s really a lovely guy, because it’s a way of convincing themselves that it’s all right to work with him. Roman Polanski may be popular in Hollywood, but I don’t really think politely turning down a chance to work with him is a career-ender. And it’s not like Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster, or John C. Reilly, who are starring in his next movie, Carnage, are vulnerable or in need of a career boost such that an opportunity to work with Polanski is critical to their future success. So I’m much less inclined to treat the involvement of untainted people in Polanski’s movies as a reason that I should excuse his past behavior and send money his way. I still haven’t seen The Ghost Writer, though I very much want to, and hope to find an occasion where I can see it for free, or on an airplane, or in some other context where I don’t have to direct any additional money in Polanski’s direction. I suppose if I was invited to a critics’ screening of a Polanski movie I would go.

This is a messy industry, and a lot of my job is assessing content that I don’t think is perfect (much less the stuff that’s downright offensive). I don’t have a blanket rule to extract from either Sheen or Polanski, and as with sports, I take them case by case, though I do keep an eye out for patterns. If the Patriots, as an organization, made the collective decision that a record of repeated violence against women wasn’t disqualifying for team membership and started signing a lot of folks with domestic violence and assault convictions, I’d stop watching. My approach here isn’t perfect, and it hasn’t shamed Polanski into submitting to justice or Sheen into doing redemptive work for domestic violence groups, nor do I expect that it will. Fixing them is not what this is about. Instead, I’m searching for positions that make me comfortable in the long term, with all the compromise and shading that inevitably entails.

Whether because he’s grown sick of being a spectacle or because he forgot, Charlie Sheen neglected to submit himself for Emmy consideration. This spares us the spectacle of camera pans to see if he’s behaving himself and the possibility of devoting even more airtime to a man who is at minimum wildly narcissistic and quite possibly very ill were he to give an acceptance speech or rush the stage, Kanye-like.

But the thing that kills me is that Sheen apparently missed the deadline to put himself in contention, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave the guy more time on the grounds that it’s a good idea to make sure “all eligible entrants” are in the running. They have the right to extend the deadline, but this is a case where discretion seems, well, less than entirely necessary or wise. This is a man whose network has declared that they don’t need him for their hit show. Charlie Sheen is not such a paragon of society or such an artistic treasure that he merits special consideration. The Academy might want the ratings that an addict who shot his fiancee, righteously pissed off his producer, and conned a bunch of Americans out of ticket money could bring into a broadcast, but there’s something distasteful about anything that even hints at an acknowledgement of that.