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If you’re the type of person who finds themselves logging into DraftKings or FanDuel a few times a week to parlay the overs on Scottie Barnes’ and Jalen Suggs’ points props, Chuck Lorre and Nick Bakay’s new Max comedy Bookie might just be for you.
The Sebastian Maniscalco-led series centers on Danny (Maniscalco), a veteran Los Angeles bookie threatened by the potential legalization of sports gambling in California. The dark comedy offers several relatable moments for gamblers, including a scene in the opening moments of the pilot where a degenerate sports bettor portrayed by Ray Romano asks Danny if he likes his three-game football parlay. “Who cares what I like?” Danny responds. “It’s just hard to get three things right in the NFL.”
As you can glean from my previous Scottie Barnes/Jalen Suggs reference, I’m intimately familiar with the predictable heartache of parlays.
Romano wasn’t the only high-profile actor to appear in the first episode of Bookie. The pilot also featured Charlie Sheen, who famously feuded with Lorre during their time together on Two and a Half Men. The bad blood led to Sheen being replaced by Ashton Kutcher for the final four seasons of the sitcom. Sheen plays an exaggerated version of himself on Bookie, with the first episode centering on Danny and his best friend Ray (Omar J. Dorsey) heading to a rehab facility to collect a debt from the former Two and a Half Men star. But when Danny and Ray arrive, they learn that Sheen isn’t a patient in the rehab facility; he’s there to host a poker game.
In a callback to the Two and Half Men pilot, one of the attendees of the game is Angus T. Jones (portraying himself), who played Jake Harper on the long-running CBS comedy. Not only that, but two of the card players on Bookie — Two and a Half Men writers Eddie Gorodetsky and Dan Foster — are the same guys who played in Charlie Harper’s poker game on the sitcom way back in 2003.
“It felt like we were closing the book on some horrible times, and we had a good time,” Lorre told TVLine when talking about the reunion. “And having Angus be part of it… Angus put acting behind after Two and a Half Men, and he just slipped right [back] into it. It was second nature to him. He was a skillful actor at 10 years old, and he was equally skillful at 30. He looks like a lumberjack now. Man, it was great.”
It’s also worth noting that we haven’t seen the last of Sheen on Bookie, with Lorre revealing that the actor will appear in another Season 1 episode. Now all we need is a Jon Cryer appearance.
