June 28, 2012

I Would Very Much Like To Murder This TV Show Savagely, Please

President Bartlet's son, mind you.<a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CharlieSheenMarch2009.jpg">Angela George</a>/Wikimedia Commons

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

It was difficult for me to finish writing my review of Anger Management because every time I think about the show I see a hot flash of red, the veins in my neck tighten, and I wake up hours later, covered in entrails, in a location I’ve never been to before.

Anger Management (premiering Thursday, June 28 at 9 p.m. EST on FX) is a loose adaptation of the 2003 Jack Nicholson/Adam Sandler comedy of the same name—a film that precisely no one was asking to be adapted into a TV show. The new laugh-track-laden sitcom stars Charlie Sheen. Remember? Sheen? Charlie? Hot Shots! Part Deux? Charlie Sheen?

Never mind. Anyway, Charlie Sheen plays an unconventional anger management therapist with anger management issues. Selma Blair shows up from time to time to have sex with Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen lazily acts his way through stock narrative.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this show. It’s listlessly acted, crappily scripted, and a textbook example of faux-edginess. (It’s rare that prison rape jokes and “I shot my boyfriend in the dick” jokes fall this deafeningly flat.) The series does score high marks for irony, though, given its title and the fact that it enrages me.

It’s godawful. It’s insultingly bad and heartachingly dumb. It’s like someone took the abruptly cancelled ABC sitcom Help Me Help You, lobotomized it, put it on cable TV, and lobotomized it all over again. So just don’t watch it, ever. The feeling you get from doing so is akin to the feeling you get after sleeping with your best friend in a feverish drunken haze during a creatively themed New Year’s party at a Holiday Inn: You will regret it almost immeidately, you will hate yourself for allowing yourself to do it, and you will likely vomit out of nausea and sadness.

This TV show ruins lives. But if you still feel the urge to tune in Thursday night, please first take a moment to tweet me your contact info. We’ll have a long conversation about this, and I will do everything I can to walk you back from the brink.

Click here for more movie and TV features from Mother Jones. To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate