So, Apparently They're Getting Married

If you've been dying to find out what the final season of Two and a Half Men has in store for your beloved characters, then prepare to cringe. When Two and a Half Men announced it would end after season 12, the big wigs promised some "great ideas" and "very big surprises" for the show. While this is a very big surprise, I'm not so sure it's such a great idea. Apparently, Two and a Half Men is planning a same-sex wedding to tie off its final season. The catch? The grooms are two heterosexual men.

This story will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen the controversial Adam Sandler and Kevin James film I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. However, while Chuck and Larry were trying to take advantage of a loophole in life insurance policy to provide for Larry's kids, Walden and Alan are trying to adopt a child together. That's right. It has nothing to do with love and it's not the satisfying end to an intriguing (if not ratings-bait) fluid sexuality storyline. Two and a Half Men is planning a wedding between two men for its final season because Walden (played by Ashton Kutcher) believes it will be easier to adopt a child as part of a married couple than as a single man.

As CBS Entertainment Chief Nina Tassler explained to TheWrap, “Walden has a near-death experience. It forces him into sort of this existential quandary and to evaluate the meaning of his life, the quality of his life, which prompts him to say, ‘I need to put down deeper roots.’ And he wants to adopt a child.”

Tassler also doesn't seem to believe that the storyline will generate any controversy among fans of the show. In fact, she seems to think they'll find it engaging and that it will encourage them into a discussion that they might not have had before. Clearly Tassler has never heard of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which, while it was a financial success, was critically panned and widely reviled for its portrayal of the LGBT community and homosexual stereotypes. She must have also missed the backlash that MTV received when they announced the plot of their show Faking It, about two heterosexual girls who pretend to be lesbians in order to be popular at their alternative school. The controversy only sustained the show through the pilot, after which people promptly forgot that it even existed.

Two and a Half Men is taking an unnecessary gamble on its final season that comes with no pay-off. In fact, it sounds like the most horrific instance of queer baiting since the most recent episode of Supernatural. Planning a wedding between two heterosexual men just because it's legal now isn't opening a dialogue. It's making a joke out of something that's still too new, and that was fought for too hard, to be funny. A same sex wedding on a primetime network is still a novelty that we need more genuine representations of and less parodies, please and thank you.

Although Tassler left it open ended as to whether or not Walden and Alan are going to discover that they're in love with one another over the course of the storyline, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Image: CBS; whatshouldtheatrecallme/Tumblr