If anyone ever tells you that you put too much Parmesan cheese on your pasta, stop talking to them. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life.
It's going to be dealt with in a dumb way, with lots of corny gross jokes, but one thing you can't really accuse Two and a Half Men version 2 of is being homophobic. In its own dumb Middle American way, Two and a Half Men version 2 is queering the notions of friendship and relationships.
Wait---what?? Are the two characters gay? Or they are play-acting as a gay couple to adopt a kid?
Gay characters--yes.
Straight characters eliciting squeals of titillated laughter from the audience by playing "gay" when the people from the adoption agency visit the house--NO.
You think, what do you want?
You think, make a decision...
It's been somewhat deliberately obfuscated by the show at this point, which has been relatively low on gay-panic comedy, all things considered. They may be heterosexuals, but they've become increasingly comfortable with the fact that they are, for lack of a better word, life partners, not just two guys living together.
It's a fairly dumb series, but from a feminist or queer theoretical standpoint, it's doing interesting things with the notion of friendship and couplehood, and not always playing them for the most obvious jokes. Is a relationship romantic and sexual by definition? Can two men have the kind of emotionally and tangentially physically intimate relationship that "very close female friends" have been known to have for decades? I think these are questions worth looking at, and in a weird way, Two and a Half Men is looking more seriously at homosociality than a lot of other sitcoms and comedies.
"Can two men have the kind of emotionally and tangentially physically intimate relationship that "very close female friends" have been known to have for decades?"
Didn't The Odd Couple already explore this? Or is this an odd couple for the 21st Century?
If anyone ever tells you that you put too much Parmesan cheese on your pasta, stop talking to them. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life.
The Odd Couple were two men living together as roommates who gradually became best friends. Jon Cryer and Ashton Kutcher's characters have very little in terms of an actual friendship, but they instead form a strange non-traditional family unit as two men who, though neither one is a homosexual, realize that the other is their soul mate and that they cannot live a normal, stable life without the other. (Throw in the bisexual maid/mother figure who openly lusts for Ashton Kutcher and Alan's lesbian niece and her lover who also live with them, and the show starts to sound, in synopsis, more like a LOGO program than a CBS mainstay.) This has led to them being assumed to be a gay couple for long enough that they no longer really fight it. In the past season, a recurring plot point has dealt with the fact that, as two straight men, their arrangement is bizarre and somewhat pathetic to most people, but when they are assumed to be gay, people treat them normally, even positively. Given that Walden is pleasant but spineless and Alan is a low-level sociopath, they have learned to use this to their advantage at times.
Now that I put it like that, it's less like The Odd Couple and more like a reverse Three's Company.
