Keen on Sheen

Charlie Sheen must be pretty keen on himself. The troubled star of the CBS show Two and Half Men has surfaced long enough from his drunkenness to remind the network that they still owe him for shows that have been cancelled due to his own crazy antics. It appears that even though Charlie Sheen was himself responsible for the cancellation of 4 episodes of the show after his latest downward spiral of prostitutes and hotel trashing, not to mention the bizarre details of his family life, he feels strongly that the network should honour its side of the bargain and pay him accordingly.

Wow, that's like trashing the office Christmas party and sending your $100 cabfare bill back to your boss as a business expense. It's refreshing in an era rife with bosses intimidating their employees and telling them that they're lucky to still have jobs as a justification for working overtime for free, that someone like Charlie Sheen is still there to speak out for himself. While many of us won't look sideways at our superiors for fear of being told that we're insubordinate, Charlie Sheen continues to act like a King- an over the top King that wants what's coming to him, even if he conveniently forgets to rule the kingdom.

On the one hand, your personal life isn't supposed to impact on your professional life or the compensation that you're due according to legal contracts. So Sheen's right on this one. His messy offscreen rock star actions aren't supposed to affect his wildly popular show. But the fact of the matter is, as an employee of CBS, he technically represents them, which means that every bad action or legal battle that he engages in is a reflectio on them. No organization is going to stand behind that kind of behavior- well, maybe Rolling Stone.

Although it's hard to say that Sheen's notoriety is working against him. True, his agent left him recently and he now has to represent himself, which is surely going to be an interesting affair. At least he knows how to self-aggrandize, which means he's way ahead of any PR company. Not to mention the train wreck that is his family life and the porn star who's trying to get him to pay her $12k for having sex with him. But the media and the fans are eating it up. It's just as entertaining as the Lohan crash. We can't all help but wonder what's next.

Sheen can really go both ways by now. He can easily become the next Michael Jackson with his oddball stories or he can embarrass and estrange his way to obscurity. Either way, it's clear that he believes inherently in his own greatness and entitlements- it's just a matter of time when we'll see whether or not he's the only one.