Charlie Sheen, who took a hiatus from his hit show Two and a Half Men in February to enter rehab and who claims to be making amends with the wife he is charged with allegedly assaulted in December, has been very busy this week. The gossip site TMZ's crew has captured him strolling nonchalantly into Radio Shack, in his pyjama bottoms. He has been in the news, with his lawyers dredging up that old legal canard to claim police failed to read Sheen his Miranda rights in the arrest, and he has been squaring off against his show's producers for more money, which he does deserve: If every member of Friends, even Lisa Kudrow, made $1-million an episode six or seven years ago, Sheen should settle for the price of two Monicas and a Ross, minimum. When Sheen taped a new episode of the show last Friday, the live audience went crazy when he made his entrance and gave him a standing ovation when he finished.
Sheen is not a changed man, nor a humbled man: It is the adamantine of his personality that so many of us love, the way that we loved, so long ago, the sight of O.J. Simpson's white Bronco - in spite of its terrible freight - making its wild, low-speed run.
The new In Touch (one of the newer and better tabloids that is heavy on the trash talk and light on the "baby bumps") reports that Sheen has been sneaking out of rehab and heading over to lingerie model Angelina Tracy's place, wearing what the headline calls "THE DUMBEST DISGUISE EVER!"
The disguise, a thick black mustache and a hooded sweatshirt, is ridiculous, and admirably so. Sheen is one of the few stars who is always candid about his sexual misconduct: He testified about having employed many of Heidi Fleiss's girls, as her countless other customers continued to hide, lie and find new, more discreet hookers. And by strolling into Tracy's home in a lazy if stache-tastic impersonation of Harry Reams (or any porn star, really), Sheen was flipping the bird at the vampiric gossip mongers who have most of Hollywood by the throat.
Then, when he shaved his head on Saturday, he might have seemed, to the novice, to be cracking up like Britney Spears, who GI-Janed before checking into rehab herself, in 2007. Producer and Sheen-pal Mark Burg, however, denies that he "is pulling a Britney" and claims the star's new baldness is a bold, tonsorial decision.
(On the other hand, both Spears and Sheen have long been linked with narcotics, drugs that stay much longer in our hair than our blood or urine. Whenever I see a man in his 40s with a shaved head, I think he is either going bald or someone has requested bio-evidence. Take note, baldies: The latter is a much cooler excuse.)
Still, it hardly matters why Sheen is playing with the paparazzi lately. Of interest only is that he is still more widely loved and admired with each misstep, as he roars through his life running red lights and narrowly missing passersby; as he makes a bold break for the freedom that eludes so many of us hung up on appearances, tightly wound and buttoned up and, tediously decent and responsible. If Charlie is the Bronco, we are the airbags he will never need, because he takes his transgressions nice and easy.
Ugly Betty ended last week, and the finale was as dark and cloying as ever. I feel that with the departure of the grating, impatient-to-be-hot America Ferrera (former teen queen and style icon Lindsay Lohan scrawled I HATE AMERICA on her dressing-room wall while shooting an aborted series of Ugly Betty guest appearances), the show could continue, if not flourish. (Oh, and the dad would have to die and the sister would need to smack the ugly off her face. And can't Judith Light, after all these years, simply return to Tony Danza's virile side - remember Who's the Boss? She could play his maid, he could bitch her out for having his Jag painted red. Who's the boss? Who cares as long as Danza signs on for one "Oh ay, ay oh, Angela" a week.
Cosmo TV The Canadian version is a riveting train wreck that includes such injuries as invasive and grotesque questionnaires, perverse factoids, mortifying interviews and the frighteningly upbeat correspondents Josie Dye and Wilder Weir. The pink channel started showing the first season of Sex and the City this week, and when I was finished writing strongly worded letters to this show's writers (who cannot still be alive: Such fatuity must be fatal) about the grammatical error on every show - "I couldn't help but wonder" - I noticed that the younger Carrie Bradshaw, then badly lit, credibly dressed and not made up by Benjamin Moore, was more likeable, more rabbit-toothed, self-conscious and - I shudder to think - human. It's too bad Sarah Jessica Parker became a producer, and in the process, the show became such a showy, vacuous production.
American Idol The contestants are so lifeless, so unoriginal, so dreary this year that even an episode mentored by Adam Lambert and dedicated to the Elvis Presley catalogue last week did not captivate me in any way. A fellow Idol fan has confided that he feels Lambert changed the show last year, and he is right - the new crew, in comparison, is like a despondent family, slowly entering the house Lambert, robbed of his victory, burned down in a three-alarm Disco Inferno.