Described recently on the Guardian.co.uk TV & Radio blog as “morbidly unfunny” Two and a Half Men is a sitcom that seems to elicit bile filled epithets like no other. And if the expressions on the faces of his fellow nominees after John Cryer’s Emmy Award win for best supporting actor are anything to go by there isn’t a great deal of respect for the show in the entertainment industry either. Yet whilst Two and a Half Men is formulaic, traditional, one dimensional and insanely repetitive I can’t help but give in to it’s charm.

Let’s look at it’s good points. It is fuelled by three great central performances. Charlie Sheen plays a narcissistic, alcoholic, jingle writing play boy to a tee. Jon Cryer and Angus T Jones appear respectively as his divorced penniless brother and his halfwit nephew. The premise is beautifully simple, Cryer is the alimony crippled wimp who becomes increasingly more wild, and Sheen is the devil may care eternal bachelor who becomes increasingly more domesticated. It’s old hat stuff, but what is inherently wrong about old hat? Some of the greatest things in life are old hat. If you’re eating a baked spud and some snarky hipster sneers, “yuk, eating food is like, so year zero”, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it.

In the current post-The Office landscape there is a wrongly held conception that traditional multi camera sitcoms filmed in front a live studio audience are, if not already dead, dying a slow death through countless repeats on E4 and the Paramount Comedy Channel. But surely if something is genuinely funny it should not have to pander to the modern assumption that the cringe inducing comedy of The Office, Peep Show and Arrested Development is the only acceptable vehicle for chuckles in the noughties. For me there is still something thoroughly enjoyable about the big, broad performance required for a sitcom filmed in front of a live audience. Classic characters like Norm from Cheers, Seinfeld’s Kramer and Niles Crane in Frasier are testament to the brilliance of actors really working their acting chops off for a packed room of people vibing off their energy.

I must also admit at this stage to my unadulterated love for Charlie Sheen, a man who is essentially a walking celebration of debauchery, hedonism, dubious 9/11 theories and, lest we forget, damn good acting. From Wall Street, through Young Guns and Being John Malkovich, to his career defining turn in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Sheen is capable of great range, emotional intensity and finely nuanced performances. This is exactly why he is so much fun in Two and a Half Men. During Cryer’s Emmy acceptance speech he said that Sheen “made it look easy”, and he was right. He is without doubt channelling his own experience garnered through countless nights spent shoving class A drugs up his beak, romping with high class call girls and brushing his teeth with champagne. He’s lived to tell the tale and brings that jaded sensibility beautifully to the role of Charlie.

Perhaps the thing that I find most endearing about Two and a Half Men, and what the critics find so loathsome, is it’s adherence to the ‘no hugging and no learning’ rule used by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David when they created what for me is the greatest sitcom of all time, Seinfeld. This means you never get what the writers of sitcoms allegedly refer to as ‘the shit bit’. You know, the bit where Ross begged Rachel not to break up with him in Friends, when John Goodman’s character died in Roseanne, or frankly 95% of hospital set crap-fest Scrubs. When these dramatic turns are done well in programmes like The Royal Family or Blackadder they have a devastating effect, but when done badly they are insulting, cynical and excruciating. Two and a Half Men eschews all this for the straight ahead gag based format, wallowing in increasingly perverse innuendo and sometimes outright smut, showcasing a marvellous ambivalence towards conservative American Christian morality which I for one find a gleefully irreverent breath of fresh air.

So next time you’re channel hopping and find an episode of Two and a Half men playing, give it a chance, because after all not everything can be Nathan Barley.