Sheen Fired!

Charlie Sheen's very public unraveling in early 2011 — culminating in his firing from Two and a Half Men by CBS and producer Chuck Lorre in March — was one of the first major celebrity implosions conducted substantially through social media, and it demonstrated with unusual clarity both the power and the limitations of that medium for managing (or mismanaging) a public crisis.

Sheen's approach to his firing was to conduct his grievance in public and at maximum volume, primarily through Twitter, where he accumulated record numbers of followers in a matter of days, and through a series of interviews that combined genuine charisma with statements that ranged from genuinely funny to deeply troubling. His coinage of "winning" as a self-description for what observers perceived as a freefall became a cultural meme of unusual durability.

The episode exposed the limits of the network television model's ability to manage talent whose personal life had exceeded the boundaries of what advertisers would accommodate. Sheen had been, by almost any measure, the highest-paid actor on American television. His value was sufficient that CBS and Lorre had accommodated years of concerning personal behavior. When that behavior became publicly impossible to ignore at the scale it reached in February-March 2011, the calculation changed.

What happened next was revealing: Sheen's tour, initially sold as proof that he could monetize celebrity outside the studio system, was partially successful before losing momentum. Two and a Half Men replaced him with Ashton Kutcher and survived. The story was less about the inviolability of star power than about how quickly situations perceived as permanent can be restructured when the parties involved are sufficiently motivated.