Spoilers below for anyone who hasn't yet watched Chuck Lorre's new Max comedy Bookie, so be warned!
Though Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre's broadcast reign looks to be coming to a close, with recent cancellation news for Bob (Hearts) Abishola somewhat coinciding with Young Sheldon's final season announcement. Thankfully for fans, his newest streaming comedy Bookie has arrived on Max, and I think many will agree the episode gets a 2 1/2 out of 2 1/2 star rating for delivering a totally surprising Two and a Half Men reunion for Charlie Sheen and Angus T. Jones that hearkened back to the very first episode of the hit sitcom. Not to mention a completely separate appearance from one of Charlie's romantic foils on the show.
Recreating Two And A Half Men's Pilot Poker Game
Bookie stars stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco as a bookie named Danny who's struggling to keep his not-exactly-trustworthy clientele current with their financial responsibilities. One of his tasks in the first episode involves tracking down Charlie Sheen to a luxurious rehab facility, and Danny finds him in the midst of a poker showdown that was no doubt wildly familiar to Two and a Half Men fans, since it involved not just Sheen and former co-star Angus T. Jones, but also the same poker buddies that were settled around the table in that episode.
It was quite a shock for any TV viewers to see Angus T. Jones on the small screen again, since he more or less bowed out of Hollywood following his controversial exit from the show at the end of Season 10 (which came after Sheen's high-profile exit). Speaking to the challenging way the show's final seasons went, and bringing Jones back into the Hollywood fold, Chuck Lorre told this to TVLine:
It was a painful couple of years. We were making a TV show, hoping to make people laugh, and we did that for eight-and-a-half years, 170-something episodes of [Two and a Half Men], and I’m really proud of the work that we did. It was really gratifying to do a little thing [together] again. And having Angus be part of it… Angus put acting behind after Two and a Half Men, and he just slipped right [back] into it. It was second nature to him. He was a skillful actor at 10 years old, and he was equally skillful at 30. He looks like a lumberjack now. Man, it was great, and we did another episode with Charlie in this first season.
Even though Jones didn't get tons of screentime, it was still quite the bonkers treat to see him share the screen with Charlie Sheen again, and as a full-blown adult no less.
And since a poker game between just two people isn't much fun, that table had to be filled up by others, and Lorre explained how he and Sheen rather quickly arrived at the idea of mirroring the Two and a Half Men pilot episode within the world of Bookie, saying:
[Charlie and I] were talking about the poker game, and pretty much simultaneously, we both went, 'Well, what if we try and recreate the poker game from the pilot?' And then the next moment was me calling Angus and saying, 'Hey, Angus! You want a job?' And the other guys in that scene were in the [Men] pilot. A couple of the guys — Eddie Gorodetsky and Dan Foster — were writers on Two and a Half Men. It was actually almost 20 years to the day that we shot the pilot of Two and a Half Men… only now, instead of being in pajamas and annoying the guys, Angus was in the game, and he was terrific. It was a wonderful thing to reunite with both those guys. It really was.
The icing on the cake was arguably the moment when Maniscalco's Danny tells Charlie Sheen that Jon Cryer was the true Two and a Half Men MVP. To be sure, Lorre said he respectfully sent Sheen each iteration of the episode's script, and alerted him of line changes, as not to offend the actor with the ribbing.
That Other Two And A Half Men Callback
Before either Charlie Sheen or Angus T. Jones popped up on the screen, however, another familiar face from Chuck Lorre's CBS sitcom arrived. As Danny and Omar Dorsey's Ray were walking through the rehab facility, they came upon a sobbing woman clearly out of sorts. How out of sorts? She didn't even recognize Sheen's name!
Which might have been a more random exchange if the character wasn't played by Jennifer Taylor, who appeared in Two and a Half Men as three different characters before landing the recurring role of Chelsea Melini, who became Charlie's fiancée for a spell. Though Chelsea's arc wrapped with the end of Season 7, Taylor reprised the role in Season 9 and again for the series finale, which Sheen famously did not appear in.
With at least one more appearance from Sheen and potentially other Chuck Lorre familiars in the future, stream the first episodes from Bookie with a Max subscription, with new installments releasing on Thursdays.
