Thank you, Charlie Sheen or Why CBS Must Be Destroyed Part II: Comedy

Charlie Sheen is on a mission to destroy trolls and anyone who is not winning. At first glance this may seem like an entertaining diversion with little effect on our lives, but it is, in reality, one of the great struggles of our time. If he is successful Charlie Eightball might just bring down one of the most oppressive and insidious forces in the current cultural zeitgeist, CBS.
In the first part of this article I went over a very brief history of the relationship between movies and television. It's a relationship that drives the creativity of both media and when either medium is doing well financially creativity suffers for it. Right now television is coming off of a twenty year run of creative boundary pushing and experimentation that brought us Seinfeld, The Office (British and American), Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Lost, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, Terriers, The Sopranos, The Simpsons, The Shield, The West Wing, Sports Night, Justified, Rescue Me, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Chappelle's Show, Mr. Show With Bob and David, The Daily Show, The Drew Carey Show, Archer, The Ricky Gervais Show, An Idiot Abroad, Weeds, Community and more.  CBS has acted as if none of these shows ever existed.  It's as if the network is stuck in state of arrested development (Oh! Arrested Development! There's another one).
In comedy the advent of the single camera format and the removal of the laugh track has been a huge leap forward in the way comedians can present their visions.  For most of its history the sitcom has been shot in the multiple camera format. You have a set with three walls (the fourth wall being your TV screen) and there are three or four cameras set up left, right, and center. The two side cameras shoot reaction shots and close ups of the characters while the center camera is used for establishing shots or bits of wild physical comedy. This system is incredibly static and constricting. Go back and watch some of your favorite sitcoms (or any show on CBS right now) and you'll see that it acts like a stage show ignoring the myriad of possibilites that film and camera work can offer.

One of the first shows to change the format was M*A*S*H. It would have been difficult for the show to portray the gritty pathos of war without giving the camera free reign to explore the character's faces and the larger world they inhabited. Interestingly this show, one of the most popular of all time, was on CBS as were many other excellent pre-nineties shows. This doesn't exonerate the network, but condemns it all the more, like the once great actor who starts phoning it in after the big paychecks start rolling (I'm looking at you, Bobby DeNiro).  Not to mention that the network insisted that the show use a laugh track which is both lame and insulting.  We do not need to be told when to laugh, but what can we expect from the network that brought us Big Brother.  You have to feel sorry for actors trying to stay in character while they wait for the laughter to die down.
The single camera format, which shoots in a fashion like filming a movie, became popular around the turn of the century (I like saying that).  Seinfeld began to intersperse single camera shoots around the usual multiple camera shots in the Jerry's apartment.  Cheers also dabbled with single camera in the later seasons when the ventured out of the bar more often. Seinfeld, however, was the show fully realized its comedic potential and gave us some of the shows greatest moments as the camera was free to move and make more interesting and dynamic shots.

Aaron Sorkin's wonderful, but short lived comedy Sports Night attempted to shoot entirely in single camera and sans laugh track. It failed because TV watchers are inherently adverse to anything different and had a hard time figuring out what it was. At the same time HBO's The Larry Sanders Show had been doing quite well using the same format. Of course, those of us who didn't have HBO had no idea of the nirvana that was going on between those squiggly lines. It's no surprise that Seinfeld alums Larry David and Larry Charles created a single camera show that blurred the line between fiction and reality. David followed in the Larry Sanders model of having celebrities play themselves, but took in one step further by showing them living their lives warts and all.

In order to make the single camera format palatable to the masses Ricky Gervais was clever enough to dress it up in the mockumentary format for his brilliant British version of The Office.  It was also successful in the states on NBC's Must See TV Thursday night and now the entire night is made up of single camera shows and all of them (except for the very racist Outsourced) have created fully realized rich three dimensional worlds. Single camera formatting has allowed show runners to move beyond the simple set-up/punchline idiom and move on to complex situations and character moments.
All of CBS's sitcoms, however, are still shot in the multiple camera format. Take a look at this promo from NBC's Community and imagine what it would look like if it were shot on a three walled static set.

In comparison watch this dynamic clip from Two and A Half Men

Oh that's hilarious!
The problem is that even though CBS has decided not to move past the set-up/punchline idiom, the multiple camera format, and the laugh track it is still the number one watched network.  This is mostly because it is the preferred network of old people, but also because most people are like my father who, in his words, "doesn't like to think when watching TV." These people turn on the tube and expect it to wash over them as they check out for the evening. These are the same people who see trailers for movies like Grown-ups and think "Thank God, now I won't have to watch Inception on Netflix. That movie makes my brain hurt." These are the majority of TV watchers because we have been told forever that people with selective tastes do not watch television and so these people go elsewhere for entertainment. So what is left is the people who want to curl up with a nice cup of same ole same ole. CBS is more than happy to provide that.
But why should we care? Because there are only so many shows that can be on the air at one time and the competition for ratings is fierce. CBS is lowering the bar and pandering to the lowest common denominator while other networks are trying to create shows with some sort of artistic integrity. Television is a business and so when good shows can not compete with the dreck on CBS then the other networks will compete by cutting the good shows and putting on more dreck. The visually stunning and narratively complex show Pushing Daisies was replaced by the nut-shot laden Wipeout because Daisies couldn't compete with the eighteenth iteration of CSI. I'm not going to go into the visual assault that is the CSI series, but I will say that CBS has allowed the same man who gave Michael Bay a career, Jerry Bruckheimer, to get his hooks into television. That is enough to make me hate them forever.
The point is that CBS is dumbing down the television world.  Television is an incredible medium that is capable of doing so much more than movies.  You can develop characters and worlds over a number of years rather than just two hours.  CBS chooses not to do this.  They opt for boring, safe, and crappy.  The play clock was added to football so that a team can't go up a score and then run out the clock without running a play.  There is no metaphorical play clock in television programming so while the rest of the networks are trying to score touchdowns CBS is sitting in the huddle with an eye on the clock waiting for the ratings to come in.
Those of us who enjoy thoughtful interesting television have watched in horror as our favorite shows are cancelled and replaced with CSI clones and terrible reality television. CBS has been assaulting the cultural landscape and turning it into a bland two dimensional shitgeist.
And that is just an inkling of why we must support Charlie Sheen and his cocaine fueled jihad against the network that paid him millions of dollars to spout one-liners in a show that is essentially the hell-spawn of an unholy three-way between The Odd Couple, My Two Dads, and the white version of the sarcastic maid from The Jeffersons.  We must help him because anything that might cause people to flip the channel to a different, better show is a good thing.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if he is a incoherent porn freak, he's a incoherent porn freak on a mission to save our pop culture souls...and to find more cocaine.