Washingtonpost news updates: The TV Column: FX rolls dice on Sheen’s new sitcom, ‘Anger Management’

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The TV Column: FX rolls dice on Sheen’s new sitcom, ‘Anger Management’

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Lisa de MoraesThe TV ColumnThe TV Column: FX rolls dice on Sheen’s new sitcom, ‘Anger Management’

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Lisa De Moraes,

PASADENA, Calif. — Picking up a series starring an apparently reformed hard-living warlock Vatican assassin without having seen a single script, much less a pilot, is not a “cynical publicity stunt” — it’s a “roll of the dice,” FX president John Landgraf insisted Sunday at Winter TV Press Tour 2012.

“I go into the process as optimistically as you can without having seen scripts,” Landgraf said cautiously of his decision to buy Charlie Sheen’s new sitcom “Anger Management,” adding, “it’s a very inexpensive series.”

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(Kristian Dowling/KRISTIAN DOWLING/PICTUREGROUP) - “I go into the process as optimistically as you can without having seen scripts,” Landgraf said cautiously of his decision to buy Charlie Sheen’s new sitcom “Anger Management,” adding, “it’s a very inexpensive series.”

Then, remembering FX’s bad-boy brand, Landgraf also mentioned, “We’re a network that likes to take risks.”

“Anger Management,” based on the 2003 hit flick of the same name, will debut on FX in June.

It was an “excellent pitch,” Landgraf told TV critics on the final day of the tour. And Sheen, who was at the meeting, was “a very different Charlie Sheen” from the tiger-blooded F-18 who entertained us and kept TMZ in copy for months when Sheen went on a tear after Warner Bros. shut down production of CBS’s hit sitcom “Two and a Half Men” so he could seek help for substance abuse and then sacked him from the show when he didn’t.

Landgraf noted the ratings threshold at which FX is committed to pick up a whopping 90 more episodes, under terms of its deal with the producers, is “a very, very high ratings threshold.”

“I don’t know whether it’ll sink like a stone .?.?. let alone whether it can sustain 90 episodes over two years,” he said.

“Everything we do is a roll of the dice. Sometimes it comes up the number you want — sometimes it does not.”

At least one TV critic has expressed the opinion that Sheen should be banished from Hollywood for his history of abusive relationships with women, Landgraf noted.

This critic does not know much about how things work in Hollywood.

“If Charlie wants to get his house in order” via a new sitcom in which his character has “complicated positive relationships with women,” that can be a very good thing — not only for Sheen, but “for society,” Landgraf said.

That’s how things work in Hollywood — so long as the thespian’s most recent project was a hit.

And, to that end, the producers of Sheen’s new show have given his character .?.?. a 13-year-old daughter.

Meanwhile, FX’s six-episode test of a late-night show starring Russell Brand will be called “Strangely Uplifting.” FX announced the project in mid-December and again in early January.

AMC’s cliffhangers

That long-delayed fifth season of “Mad Men” will debut with a two-hour episode on Sunday, March 25, the network’s programming chief Joel Stillerman revealed Saturday to the hotel ballroom’s worth of critics.

And “The Killing” returns for a second season with a two-hour premiere on Sunday, April 1. But, Stillerman hastened to add, despite the state of high knicker-knottedness among some of the same critics he was addressing, the identity of the killer from Season 1 will not — repeat NOT — be revealed until the end of Season 2. Which, he noted, is how it played out in the series’s original, Danish version.

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