Chuck Lorre’s memoir shows CBS feared Jon Cryer as comedy’s death sentence on Two and a Half Men, then the show became a hit.
Long before Charlie Sheen’s public collapse, CBS executives tried to keep Jon Cryer off the cast of the sitcom that would define a decade of network comedy.
USA TODAY reports that in his new book “Sitcom,” co-creator Chuck Lorre recounts a blunt warning from the network’s head of casting and a reluctant sign-off from the top: Cryer, they insisted, was box-office poison in half-hour form.
The fear was not abstract. Before the 2003 premiere, Cryer had already headlined four short-lived sitcoms. None lasted past a single season. Network logic followed a straight line from that track record to a verdict on the man himself.
Peter Golden, then CBS’s head of casting, reached Lorre by phone while the Alan Harper role was still open. The message left no room for debate.
Golden told him:
"Just be warned, we don't want to hear the words 'Jon Cryer,'"
Lorre had worked with Cryer before, on the failed 1997 ABC pilot “It’s Good to Be King” and on “Dharma & Greg,” where Cryer played Dharma’s ex. He liked what he saw. The network did not.
In the memoir, Lorre spells out the judgment he heard next:
“I was told... yep, you know where this is going... (Cryer) was the death of comedy,”
He continues the network’s case in the same passage:
“He’d been cast on several failed pilots and series, ergo he must be to blame. All by himself. Jon Cryer, the beloved Duckie in ‘Pretty in Pink,’ was the death of comedy.”
Four canceled shows became proof that the actor, not the scripts or the concepts, had sunk them. That is the incentive structure Hollywood still runs on: pin the corpse on the familiar face and move on.
Lorre and his casting allies kept pushing. Cryer read opposite Charlie Sheen in front of skeptical CBS executives, including network chairman and CEO Les Moonves. The room saw the pairing work. Lorre broke into applause.
Moonves, described as grim that day, was not amused.
He asked:
"Really? Applause?"
Lorre answered him directly:
"You saw what I saw, he was great,"
Moonves finally eased the ban. He offered Lorre “enough rope”, the rest of the threat left hanging in the air. The pilot landed. The series became an instant hit and ran 12 seasons and 262 episodes on CBS.
Cryer played Alan Harper, the put-upon brother, for the full run. He won two Emmys in the role. The second arrived in 2012, the year after the network fired Sheen.
Sheen took home about $1.25 million per episode at the height of the show’s power. Lorre’s memoir revisits the star’s final stretch as a “cesspool” of sex-tape stories and excuses, including an exploding Bic lighter, used to miss filming. Cryer stayed on the job.
In Netflix’s 2025 documentary “aka Charlie Sheen,” a shaved-head Cryer summed up those eight shared years with a dry line of his own: he had hair when they started. Ashton Kutcher later filled Sheen’s slot for 84 episodes across the final four seasons. The series ended in 2015.
The same network that branded Cryer the death of comedy collected a dozen years of hits built on the actor it tried to blacklist. The expensive leading man imploded. The steady co-star collected awards and finished the job.
Hollywood executives love a simple villain when a show fails. They are slower to admit when their own casting panic almost killed a franchise that paid them for years.
