Bookie: How Chuck Lorre and Charlie Sheen (Two and a Half Men) Made Amends for the Max Comedy Series

(Photo: Max/Warner Bros. TV)

Bookie (formerly titled How to Be a Bookie) is coming soon to Max, and the new comedy has reunited executive producer Chuck Lorre and actor Charlie Sheen more than a decade after their well-publicized falling out over Two and a Half Men.

In the new Bookie series, Sebastian Maniscalco stars as a veteran Los Angeles bookie named Danny. The future of his livelihood is being thrown into chaos with the potential legalization of sports gambling in California. Alongside best friend and former NFL player Ray (Omar J. Dorsey), side-hustling sister Lorraine (Vanessa Ferlito), and reluctantly reformed drug dealer Hector (Jorge Garcia), Danny must contend with his increasingly unstable clients as he tries to settle their debts, all while making plenty of risky bets of his own. Andrea Anders and Maxim Swinton also star. Sheen will recur, playing a version of himself.

Bookie co-creator Lorre said the following about the realization that a “TBD” real-life celebrity role should be Sheen, per Variety:

“It should be Charlie. I remember Charlie was very much engaged in in sports betting and he would tell me stories about it all the time. You know, when things were good.

[I have] gotten to this place where it’s old news. I loved working with Charlie on Two and a Half Men. We did 170 episodes together before it all fell apart. And more often than not, we had a good time. Assuming he’s in a good place, I’m in a good place.

I was nervous, but almost as soon as we started talking, I remembered, we were friends once … And that friendship just suddenly seemed to be there again. I don’t want to be too mawkish about it, but it was healing. And he was also totally game to make fun of himself. When he came to the table read of that episode, I walked up, and we hugged. It was just great.

He proceeded to kill it at the table read. His chops were just so finely tuned, as if we had not missed a beat.”

Sheen had one concern as his fictional self was staying at a rehab facility. Lorre was happy to adjust that and said,

“He’s playing a version of himself that has shadows of past problems and he was fine with it. He was kind of like, ‘can we not do the drug-addled Charlie anymore?’ It’s a rehab that he knows, but he’s not there to dry out from drugs and alcohol — he’s just running a poker game. And that solved that. I wasn’t seeking to do damage to the man. I wanted to hopefully take people’s perceptions and make it comedic, not dark.”

Co-creator Nick Bakay also spoke about Sheen appearing on the Max series. He said:

“Look, there’s an exploitive level to it, which is, it’s kind of fantastic for our first episode. But there’s a bigger part of it, and this is what really is my takeaway throughout all of it: Through all the carnage, these guys made beautiful music together. And Charlie’s really good. There was that realization of like, Yeah, this is one of the best comedy actors. And it was like watching a guy in batting practice grooving balls over the fences again.”

Bookie arrives on Max on November 30th.

What do you think? Are you excited to see How to Be a Bookie on Max later this month?