Ashton Kutcher — the King of Twitter — has suddenly gone all coy over reports that his entourage is putting the final touches on a deal to have him replace Charlie Sheen on CBS’s “Two and a Half Men.”
“I’m starting to become convinced that people put my name in articles just to improve their SEO [search engine optimization] or hoping I’ll tweet it,” Kutcher tweeted peevishly Thursday night. Poor baby!
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Pulitzer Prize winner, Peabody recipient, Medal of Freedom honoree -- Lisa de Moraes is none of these, but she is an authority on the bad direction, over-acting, and muddled plot lines being played out in the TV industry's executive suites.
His reference is to published reports that he is in talks to take a role on the country’s most popular sitcom, which suddenly found itself one man short when Warner Bros., which produces the show, sacked Sheen back in March. The studio cited his erratic behavior and screeds against show creator Chuck Lorre.
Great. Kutcher’s finally got something he could tweet that we really want to know about, and now he clams up. Geesh!
Later in the evening, Kutcher tweeted: “what’s the square root of 6.25?”
The answer, of course, is 2.5.
Kutcher’s reps are in advanced talks to have him join the comedy in the fall. His is the second name in 48 hours to surface as the designated Sheen replacement. Warner Bros. was also in a state of advanced talks with Hugh Grant to join the show, but that deal fell apart at the 11th hour over “creative differences.”
And by “creative differences,” the trades meant: “Hugh Grant did not want to work that hard.” Because if you’re going to be the star of the country’s most popular comedy series, you’re signing up for 24 episodes a season. That’s 24 whole weeks of work!
The report on Kutcher first broke in the trade publication Broadcasting & Cable. Then the trade publication Hollywood Reporter took that ball and ran with it, noting that Kutcher would be a great get, because he’d bring his youthful fan base to CBS, as well as his 6.7 million Twitter followers, which would help CBS promote the show.
CBS and Warner Bros. got fooled by that gag once before, back in 2009 when CW — ironically a co-venture of CBS and Warner Bros. — bought Kutcher’s semi-autobiographical models-are-more-interesting-than-you drama “The Beautiful Life.” Kutcher was going to use the whole Twitter thing to get all his followers to watch the show and CW would have more viewers than it knew what to do with.
Kutcher did, in fact, tweet the heck out of it, in the days leading up to, and after, its launch. The ratings were so spectacularly lousy, CW killed “The Beautiful Life” after just two episodes — and that’s saying something because, remember, we’re talking CW here.
Anyway, Warner Bros. issued a terse “no comment” Thursday on the Kutcher report. CBS is scheduled to unveil its new prime-time plans — and, presumably, its Sheen replacement plans — on Wednesday at Carnegie Hall.
Couric producer to ABC
Katie Couric has not yet said where she’s going to land when she leaves “CBS Evening News,” but her departing executive producer, Rick Kaplan, has already landed at ABC News, where he will executive-produce “This Week With Christiane Amanpour.”
Kaplan will also oversee ABC News’s political coverage, ABC News President Ben Sherwood announced Thursday.
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