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Charlie Harper is a bachelor in paradise complete with Malibu beach house overpaid job and a very active dating life. Then his uptight brother Alan in the throes of a divorce moves in - and brings his 10-year-old son Jake with him. Sorry Charlie. It looks like paradise lost. This 4-disc set includes all 24 Season-One Episodes of the breezy comedy - the People's Choice Award winner as Favorite New Series - starring Charlie Sheen as Charlie and Jon Cryer as Alan. As the brothers reestablish a sense of family Charlie also bonds with Jake (Angus T. Jones). Holland Taylor is the guys' domineering mother Marin Hinkle is Alan's icy ex and Melanie Lynskey is Rose who thinks one date with Charlie means life-long commitment. Meet the Harper men - two adults one kid and no grown-ups.Running Time: 501 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/SERIES & SEQUELS UPC: 012569594418 Manufacturer No: 59441

Amazon.com:

Hedonistic bachelor Charlie (Charlie Sheen) is a jingles writer who, he blithely states, makes a lot of money for doing very little work, sleeps with beautiful women who don't ask about his feelings, drives a Jag and lives at the beach, and sometimes, in the middle of the day, for no reason at all, likes to make himself a big pitcher of margaritas and take a nap out on the sundeck. His brother, Alan (Jon Cryer), evicted from his house by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, is "rigid, inflexible, uptight, obsessive and anal-retentive." Charlie and Alan are "twisted Jungian archetypes," according to series co-creator Chuck Lorre in one of this set's bonus features. If by "twisted Jungian archetypes," he means Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple, then yes, Charlie and Alan are "twisted Jungian archetypes," and this inaugural season finds rich comic tension in their period of adjustment. Charlie is a Man Behaving Badly, whose idyllic life is upended when "fuddy-duddy" Alan moves in, accompanied by his impressionable 10-year-old son, Jake (Angus T. Jones), with whom he shares custody with his iceberg-cold, sexually confused (a comic conceit thankfully abandoned by season's end) estranged wife, Judith (Marin Hinkle). Alan is a single father who is appalled by his amoral brother's lifestyle and by the influence Charlie might have on Jake ("Uncle Charlie, I understand the point spread, but I'm still confused about the vig"). And then there's Berta (effortless scene-stealer Conchata Ferrell), Charlie's formidable, tart-tongued housekeeper who is initially driven out the door by Alan's fussiness ("The peanut butter stains on Jake's shirts really require an enzyme presoak").

Two and a Half Men is a guy show that sets feminism back a good three decades. Women are portrayed as either bimbonic objects of lust (Transformers' Megan Fox guest stars as Berta's teenage granddaughter), vengeful and retaliative (Heather Locklear as Alan's divorce lawyer), crazy hot (Jenna Elfman as an unstable single mother on the run), or emasculating (Holland Taylor as Charlie and Alan's mother, or, as Charlie refers to her, "Mom, the Impaler"). The charming Melanie Lynskey's is a particularly thankless role, that of Rose, Charlie's "insightful and disturbing" stalker, who becomes Jake's babysitter. While Charlie's "bad-boy act" could quickly get old in lesser hands, Sheen, in the past not the most natural of comic actors, is in his element. Charlie's genuine affection for Jake goes a long way toward redeeming his character (and lack of it). Two and a Half Men, a People's Choice Award-winner its first season, really adds up with a crudely funny sense of humor that is all kinds of wrong, but also smart and, at times, even sweet. --Donald Liebenson

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