Good riddance to Two and a Half Men, TV's laziest sitcom

The welcome end of a series too lazy to be ambitious and too bland to be offensive

Two and a half Men
(Image credit: (Darren Michaels/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. ©2013 WBEI))

Tonight, after 12 years and 262 episodes, CBS' Two and a Half Men will shamble to an end. You will not see many fond farewells.

Two and a Half Men is a Kudzu vine that embedded itself in CBS in 2003, infecting the entire TV landscape with its awfulness. It's the rock on which producer Chuck Lorre built his television empire, which continues full-steam with the similarly execrable Big Bang Theory. It led to Lorre-produced imitators like Mike & Molly, and numerous slipshod knock-offs aiming for a similarly sizable viewership, including CBS' own Two Broke Girls. Along the way, it wasted the talents of actresses as talented as Jane Lynch, Amber Tamblyn, Judy Greer, and Melanie Lynskey, who's finally getting the chance to play a real human being in HBO's Togetherness.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.