How Ashton Kutcher "Saved" 'Two & A Half Men'...According to Chuck Lorre

[Brian Damage]

AWARDSLINE: Let’s start with Two And A Half Men. Why was it important to you to keep it on the air even after part of that eighth season got scratched?
CHUCK LORRE: It wasn’t simply my decision. There were a lot of people involved and so forth. Including, you know, you’ve got Warner Bros. who had a Chuck Lorregreat deal with it, economically, at stake. But by and large there was a family of people that had worked together for eight years and a lot of people were counting on the show continuing for a number of reasons. One was it was a livelihood for a lot of people and we had a great time on it and had a lot of fun doing the show all the time.

AWARDSLINE: When did you know that this was going to work?
LORRE: I think when I first met with Ashton [Kutcher] I got a sense he was a remarkable young man and a remarkable actor who had a tremendous amount of charisma and skill as well. He really knows what he’s doing and we had lots of conversations, and over a period of time he started to see that there was a way to do this and there was a way of arising from the ashes as it were.

AWARDSLINE: And what was the most gratifying thing about this season for you, after you were put in the center of the whole tumultuous situation?
LORRE: Keeping this large group of people together. A lot of the folks on Two And A Half Men go back to ’95 on Dharma And Greg. So there are long relationships with lots of people and the fact that we could keep going and have a good time. We had a terrific time making the show this year. It’s exciting, it was frightening, no one really knew if it was going to work. It was one of those things where everything we did was under a microscope. It did seem at a certain point that there was no harm in trying.

But we could have slunk off and called it a show after eight and a half years. But it didn’t seem like there was any down side to trying to keep the show alive or what people might think of it. We certainly weren’t going to hurt anybody by trying.

AWARDSLINE: It sounds like you were close to tossing in the towel. Was there some extra determination of not letting another person dictate whether this show lived or died?
LORRE: It was just this hope that we could write something that we could believe in and have fun building and it was actually pretty exciting last June sitting in a room with [series co-creator and EP] Lee Aronsohn and [writers/producers] Eddie Gorodetsky and Jim Patterson and Don Reo. We sat in a room and said ‘OK let’s figure out how to do this.’ Going into the ninth season of something and being frightened — that’s a remarkable place to be. I’d never obviously experienced it because we were ending a series and starting one in 22 minutes. That first episode had to, in a sense, end a series and start a series and somehow have closure and open up a whole new world of possibilities. And how do you do that? Frankly I didn’t know. There were a lot of false starts.

AWARDSLINE: You’ve often said that you didn’t feel that the show got the respect it deserved in Emmy season and from critics, even though Jon Cryer won the Emmy a couple of years ago. Do you feel like the love increased after the debacle?
LORRE: No, I don’t feel anything like that. I actually feel what an idiot I was to even say that. It’s just ridiculous, you know, to not be grateful for the success of the show and not to focus on what’s not happening. I mean that’s just preposterous. That’s indefensible. If I could eat those words — please.

http://www.deadline.com/2012/06/emmy...y/#more-287581