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I'm Dana Stevens and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest Summer Strutt Edition.

It's Wednesday, July 11th, and on today's program, we're going to talk about anger management, the new Charlie Sheen sitcom on FX.

The Busy Trap, Tim Kreider's op-ed piece in The New York Times, which has been at the top of everybody's most emailed list for a couple weeks now.

And the Summer Strut playlist of 2012, our listener-sourced summer songs. Joining me is Slate Deputy Editor Julia Turner. Hey, Julia. Hi, Dana. And joining us remotely from our Ghent Bureau, which is why I'm hosting today's show, is Stephen Metcalf, critic at large. Hey, Dana. How's it going? Hey, Julia. Hi. I'm so incredibly bummed that I'm not actually there to record this with you.

But because I'm at home, I get to leave my Capri Juggings on.

Oh, good.

I didn't realize that was your outfit.

And I assume you're wearing some kind of like shredded top with tassels.

Yeah.

Aymmetrical. Off the shoulder.

Sweet.

So around a year after the very public meltdown of Charlie Sheen and his exiting the show Two and a Half Men on CBS, he now has a new sitcom on FX that premiered a couple weeks ago. It's now aired twice, and it's called Anger Management. It actually got really surprisingly good numbers for its first week. Yeah. and slightly fell off the second week, but it's still looking like a pretty big hit for FX. So we watched both episodes of anger management. Julia, this was your call. Oh, my God, you're going to pin it on me. All right. I personally apologize to you both. I'm sorry I made us watch anger management. What a horrible show. The plot of the show is about someone who's

holding it together, right? The notion behind it is that Charlie Sheen plays another guy named Charlie,

who is a former ball player who had an anger management problem and who ended his own career

when he, in a fit of rage, snapped a bat on his own thigh, thus breaking his knee

with a career-ending injury. Then he went to become a therapist, and now he runs two anger

management groups, one in a prison and the other out of his living room, and has a daughter,

...