TV Legend Chuck Lorre Talks New ‘Sitcom’ Memoir, Charlie Sheen, More w/Rich

The first blurb on the back of Chuck Lorre's new book comes from the last person you would expect to endorse it. "When it comes to sitcoms, and as a general life rule, always bet on the guy not hammered on crack," wrote Charlie Sheen.

Lorre, the creator behind Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon, Mom, Dharma & Greg and The Kominsky Method, stopped by The Rich Eisen Show to talk about Sitcom: A Memoir. His reaction to getting that quote from Sheen was simple. "I thought it was gold," he told Rich. "I immediately called the publisher and said, 'This is it.'"

## Charlie Sheen, Bookie and the Reconciliation

The blurb only exists because the two men found their way back to each other. "It was a terrific thing that after all that nonsense, we were able to reconcile," Lorre said.

Sheen went on to do guest spots on Bookie, playing himself as a degenerate gambler opposite Sebastian Maniscalco's character. When Lorre pitched it, Sheen's response was, "Yeah, I know a little bit about that." In the first episode, Sheen tries to barter his way out of a gambling debt with sports memorabilia, offering what Lorre remembers as "Babe Ruth's autopsy report."

Rich admitted he was about to ask whether Sheen actually owned it. "No, that was our joke," Lorre said, though he added that Sheen really does have "an extraordinary collection of memorabilia," including what Lorre believes is one of Ruth's contracts with the Red Sox.

Later, Rich asked about the one phone call that stood out from the worst of the Sheen saga. Lorre could not pick one. "The whole thing's a long dark tunnel," he said. "It was humiliating. It was hurtful. It was embarrassing." He had been "happily anonymous for many years," and suddenly had paparazzi parked in front of his house.

Then, years later, it was simply gone. "I woke up one day and it was gone," Lorre said. "All my anger, all my emotions about the whole thing." He picked up the phone: "Hey, Charlie. It's Chuck. I got a crazy idea."

## Why Write It Now

Lorre described his path as "a roller coaster descent into darkness," and said he had been telling these stories to people for years before a dear friend kept nudging him to write them down. Once he started, he discovered something. "This is therapeutic," he said. "There's some kind of healing process in actually the process of writing down my memory of events."

## The Roseanne Break

His biggest break, "without question," was getting hired as a writer on Roseanne. Lorre reminded Rich that in 1990 and '91, about 40 million people a week watched the show in real time. "There was no DVRs yet. Nobody knew how to use a VCR."

It was not a gentle place to learn. Lorre called it a "dark environment" with 60 and 70 hour weeks. "But everybody who worked there got better," he said. "You got better or you got gone." He was at a point in his life where there was no retreat. "Had I left, I simply would have been unemployed."

## A Noble Failure

His first shot at running his own show came from Carsey-Werner, the company behind Roseanne and Cosby. They had an idea about an unhappy, rotund housewife and took it to Lorre's boss on Roseanne, who passed because it was "just a rip-off of Roseanne." Then it came to Lorre. "I looked at it and I went to myself, this is just a rip-off of Roseanne. I'm in."

The show became Frannie's Turn. CBS ordered six episodes, put it on Saturday night at 8:00, and aired only five. Lorre figured his career was over. Instead, Werner walked into his office and told him it was "a noble failure. Let's try again."

"I had never heard noble and failure put together," Lorre said. The second try became Grace Under Fire, a big hit. "I suddenly had some credibility."

## Four Hits at Once

Lorre eventually had Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly, The Big Bang Theory and Mom on the air at the same time. Early on, when he was "in trouble with two," he reached out to Norman Lear, who once had seven shows going.

Lear's advice was blunt. "You're not going to like the answer," Lorre recalled him saying. "You go where the fire's burning the brightest and you try and put it out."

## Two and a Half Men and Saying Yes

Two and a Half Men was not drawn from Lorre's life, though "the fall down drunk of it all was something I was familiar with." He developed it with his friend Lee Aronsohn, and nearly everyone told him not to: the president of Warner Bros., his agent and his then wife. "And there are quite a few wives, but that's another story," he said.

But a friend had once told him, at a low point in his career, to say yes to everything. He did, and he believes his career would have ended without it. "I couldn't have gone into CBS a couple years later and said, 'I want to do a show about quantum physicists.'"

Lorre also pointed out that for seven years, the show "ran beautifully." At one point Sheen demanded a four-day work week and a huge raise and got both. The work week was "maybe 25 hours a week," with a week off every two weeks, until the eighth season "when it went off the rails."

## The Big Bang Theory, From Idea to Finale

The Big Bang Theory started with Bill Prady, who had worked for Lorre on Dharma & Greg. For a couple of years the two got nowhere. Then Prady described the computer programmers he worked with in New York, guys who "could figure pi to 80 decimals but couldn't figure a tip in a restaurant because there's too many variables."

"Bill, that's our show," Lorre told him, with one change: skip the programmer cliche and "make them real scientists."

His favorite episode is the finale, when Sheldon wins the Nobel Prize for physics and admits he could not have gotten there without his friends. "I thought that was a beautiful way to land the ship," Lorre said. He sees his own story in it. "I didn't do anything alone." He credited his writers and actors, including Jim Parsons, Christine Baranski, Allison Janney, Melissa McCarthy and Kaley Cuoco, and added that anyone who tries to do it alone will fail, "unless you're Taylor Sheridan."

## The Jim Parsons Screen Test

Rich guessed the answer before he asked the question: the best screen test Lorre ever saw was Parsons. "His whole body became the character," Lorre said. It was not how he had pictured Sheldon, so he asked casting director Nikki Valko to bring Parsons back to see if it was a fluke. "He came back in and he did it. He nailed it."

Lorre realized how deeply the show was landing at a Comic-Con signing, when a young girl approached Parsons with her hands shaking, crying. He had seen fans react to John Goodman, Roseanne, Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer. "No one ever cried," he said. "They were outliers, these characters, and I think people identified with that."