I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily show that would be on otherwise).

23: Two and a Half Men

Oh, Two and a Half Men. TV's biggest comedy has been running now for an unbelievable 8 years and shows no signs of slowing down (Yes - shouldn't it now be called 3 men? Phew, needed to get that joke out of the way). Charlie Sheen might be regarded as something of a genius and an argument for TV over movies - who needs film when he makes 1.78 million an episode - about 40 million a year, and pretty much a guarantee of not flopping.

My friends and I have a minor inside joke that went on for a while where we were going to start a blog called the 2.5ers and dissect every Two and a Half Men episode joke by joke explaining how each one is funny and consequently why the show is so great. It could have been a thing.

You probably know the premise, they're not all that much to it. Recently divorced fairly pathetic man (Emmy award winner Jon Cryer) moves in, along with his son, to his ladies' man brother's (Sheen, of course) swank Malibu house. Honestly, there's a whole lot more characters than I realized - I've seen a couple of episodes, but there's eight seasons worth - and I'm sure loads of backstory and loves gained and lost, but really what it is, love it or hate it, is the standard bearer for Classic American Sitcom on TV right now (Big Bang Theory might be making a push sadly but it's still a ways away).

What I didn't know is that apparently there was a CSI/Two and a Half Men crossover which sounds absolutely insane - in the Two and a Half Men part of the crossover apparently a man is found dead, assumed to be murdered, but actually was a con artists and died of a heart attack (sure that's a super incomplete description of the episode - but be honest - do you really care? And if you do, and you haven't seen it, I'm sorry I ruined it for you.)

I feel like I may be out of touch with a certain demographic - Two and a Half Men has long been my go to for a stupid, but super popular show (amazingly - the "Critical Reception" section on wikipedia is two lines - the daily news calls it "solid, well-acted and occasionally funny" and some Australian calls it a "sometimes creepy, misogynistic comedy" - pretty much all one needs to say about the show I guess - metacritic does't have any reviews in its database either). Now, I had long assumed the show's audience to be limited to people twenty years older than me and in the fly-over states, but I ended up engaged in a conversation with two people around my own age, one of whom began a sentence, "you know what show actually has really good writing?" and answered her own question with Two and a Half Men, with which the other person wholeheartedly agreed. I couldn't keep silent, but I was outnumbered.

What else is there to say though - you know what it is, there's nothing particularly interesting about it - you either enjoy watching it, or you don't, and against my preference, more of America is in the former than the latter. Oh well, there are worse things.