Entertainment

Is 'Two And A Half Men' Getting...Better?

by Alanna Bennett

CBS' Two and a Half Men has been at the center of, well, an awful lot of firestorms. There was the whole Charlie Sheen thing, then the whole thing where the young one thought the show was full of heathens, and just the whole general thing where the show was built off of misogyny. But Amber Tamblyn's on the show now! And Tamblyn's pretty psyched about the LGBT representation her character provides.

Here's what she said during a recent appearance on Running Later With Scott Rogowsky:

It's great to play a lesbian character that is not the butt of jokes and that is actually the one that supplies the jokes and oftentimes is not cast as the villain in a sitcom, or a stereotype or any of those things... I think they've got a lot of young, great writers and it's kind of amazing for a show like that to go through the changes that it has and really come from being a show that was primarily for men and male-based jokes to jokes that, really, a lot of women and a lot of friends of mine who are gay and even transgender love it.

Full disclaimer: I have, for the most part, avoided Two and a Half Men like the plague — a couple of episodes were enough to convince me never to go back. But the show's also recently been called "one of the most sex-positive, queer-friendly shows on television," and I personally also have a weirdly strong loyalty to Tamblyn held over from my days of being obsessed with Joan Of Arcadia, so I'm inclined to believe her on this one. If you need a second opinion, here's what Slate's June Thomas said on the matter:

I decided to check back to see if the show’s writers had come up with anything interesting for Jenny to do, or if, as I suspected, they’d exhausted their supply of cheap jokes about sore jaws and supercharged lezzie libidos before Tamblyn moved into her on-set trailer.

The answer, astonishingly, is that Jenny has become one of the most interesting lesbians on television.

While the context of which shows go the extra mile (AKA what really should be considered the bare minimum) with LGBT representation on television does matter, it is encouraging to see a show that has historically been so rotten in its treatment of women really embrace not only a woman, but a queer woman as one of its own. So...keep on keeping on, Two and a Half Men?

I can't believe I just typed that.