This all too sad saga of Charlie Harper! I know, I know! What could be more trivial to modern human existence than another television J-com sarcastically parodying real life? America’s generations have been saturation bombed over past decades by Archie Bunker and Al Bundy and a whole slew of other semi-seasonal fatally flawed Greek theater hero sagas. The ever hapless weekly adventures of this version of a modern day Castor and Pollux reflective of directly implying the death of the American male. A worst case scenario of a world where men supposedly o Western European heritage have been completely trivialized as chronic dysfunctional perpetual losers. Both of the characters in this tale lost to wandering but overlapping paths always ending in mutual ill fortune at the hands of the fairer sex.The scripted format starting at the point of the contrast of their opposite personalities and ending after twenty minutes minus commercials at a shared curse of an inability to reconcile a childhood absent of nurturing motherly connection. Their mother merely a marble festin d’ pierre ever ready to dine with them to invoke the infamy of her predatory self-serving behaviors that seem more in line with the worst of classic male stereotypes that the species possesses. The apparent pathos attracting continued audience interest through the tangle of mixed emotions each season residing in the genuine cluelessness of the brothers to avoid their fate. The inability to understand the consequences of their baser misguided impulses repeated again and again in a vain attempt to discover those vital parts of themselves that are completely absented. Albeit always demonstrating the worst judgment possible in every situation, leaving them ever more damaged and estranged from the world of eligible women that flit around them. Their only easily accessible human bond of any promise being their uncomfortable connection with themselves under the dubious banner of familial instincts that are unwillingly evidenced against their respective but eternally flawed better judgments.
Much like Ulysses set perpetually adrift to the farthest reaches of the ancient seas, Charlie himself continues to employ the superficiality of his hard won wits to avoid the lurking perils in evidence at each sexual port of call. Waylaid by his own willingness to open himself up to the windbag of his own hubris he is continually blown off course continually landing in that foreign territory of feminine allure to seek another piece of ‘strange’. Seemingly fearless in facing another challenge to his manhood then to once again escape that web of self-serving intention lurking behind each of his partners as quickly as possible. Too foolishly prideful to challenge the guile of these many Sirens he always finds himself drawn towardds, ever more menacing Scylla’s of feminine guile. And fatally entranced successively by the fiction of yet another all too willing and open Charybdis’,he himself must eventually be shipwrecked. The cumulative series of misadventures endured in search for ever more dulcet peaks and valleys experienced in the mounting episodes leaving the armor of his confident self-image rusted away and his liver ever more nakedly vulnerable to those circling eagles using their amorous physical attraction. Eventually the naturally piggish ways of his character are penned up by the enslavement of the overly bounteous Circe. Yet throughout this repressed sojourn, he still pathetically searches for unconditional acceptance offered in a lifelong fantasy of a faithfully waiting Penelope who is ever willing to accept his eternally flawed embrace. The larger irony of the story behind these brothers from the very first episode being that the younger plays a perpetual suitor ever ready to steal brides and lands from his older brother out of a deranged sense of sibling rivalry. The lesser one playing the guise of the perennial victim to the hilt! The conclusive irony of the series culminating in an ephemeral woman Rose ever present as the stalker serving as Charlie’s Athena. she is ever one step ahead of his better judgment effortlessly leading him to his eventual doom throughout so as to satisfy her own abnormally abstract earthly agendas. The ‘half‘ in this saga is the mutual offspring Jake who is born of the brother’s foreheads in embodying the perfect model of cluelessness about women and life but without the perpetual dumb luck of his fathers.
Without deferring to another descend into Hades again in order to demystify other examples of this tele-scripted lineage eHouse of Atreus, one wonders why the doyens of Hollywood who create these comic farces are ever ready to unleash their furies as derived from these early Greek myths upon the Goyishly unaware TV audience? The older mysteries of the grove cast in eternal night are ever replete and liberally stocked with so many well-heeled owl happy supplicants. All of them seemingly wishing for the return of their favorite fallen angel upon the chariot of the sun to come back to illuminate them all? So much like besotted winemakers who are perpetually condemned to fall in love with every vintage of their own making that they become trapped in the past tense of so many of their own well-woven tales. The sin of pride eventually loosing their own sense of hubris into the rest of the world revealing the true name of their most favored god before all. And eventually finding their small clique being taken to task vocally by that unexpected little boy who calls out the fact of their complete disrobing. The perpetual liquor of any inability to sense the reality of self, merely a morning fog that is all so quickly eaten away by the dramatic heat encountered at that showdown of high noon.