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Last night's season premiere of "Two and a Half Men," the first time Ashton Kutcher showed up onscreen to replace Charlie Sheen, drew 27.7 million viewers, which is a record for the show, according to CBS News.
The episode featured the highly-touted introduction of Ashton Kutcher's character, Walden Schmidt, there to replace now-deceased Charlie Harper, played by Charlie Sheen. In case you have arranged your living quarters under a boulder for the past year, Sheen was fired by the show's producers over his drug use and erratic behavior, then spent a few months spewing manic public rants about the show's executive team, then sued the show for $100 million.
According to the Huffington Post, "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre took the season premiere as an opportunity to get back at Sheen for all the trash-talking Lorre endured.
During Harper's onscreen funeral, one woman claimed that she wanted to spit in his coffin while others yelled out the names of STDs they got from him, and later the character was referred to as lacking dignity and exploding "like a balloon full of meat" when he died by being hit by a train.
It's tough to say whether the show will keep up this initial audience. Commenters at the New York Times, for instance, were nearly unanimous in saying that Ashton Kutcher wasn't funny and that the show won't be as good without Sheen, but MTV has a roundup of quotes from critics who say that he did just fine.
