Charlie Sheen did not go unpunished.


He is now the star of a sitcom on FX that makes “The Bob Newhart Show” seem daring.


The coyly titled “Anger Management” begins Thursday, and it pivots off this troubled actor’s notorious meltdown last year, a drug- and alcohol- fueled, video-recorded tantrum that, among other things, led CBS to fire him from the hit show “Two and a Half Men,” and turned phrases like “tiger blood” and “winning” into national punch lines.


Mr. Sheen’s comeback is not pitched as an act of contrition. Making a vice out of necessity, he is featured in an ad for the Fiat 500 Abarth titled “House Arrest”; in it he speeds the car around the interiors of a Mediterranean villa, then comes to a screeching halt on the wood parquet. “I love being under house arrest,” he says, flashing an ankle monitor and grabbing a gorgeous model. “What do I get for good behavior?”


Promos for his FX series start with a fiery train wreck, and Mr. Sheen walking away unscathed and smiling naughtily, saying, “Everyone deserves a 24th chance.”


But “Anger Management” is full of comeuppance. Mr. Sheen plays a former baseball player named Charlie who lost his career to rage and becomes a therapist. The premise isn’t terrible, and Mr. Sheen looks at ease in the part, but the show is a strikingly subdued version of his old sitcom.


The plot seems to owe more to karma than clever scriptwriting. It could just as easily be titled “One and a Half Men.” In this comedy Mr. Sheen plays a watered-down blend of the two lead characters in “Two and a Half Men.” This Charlie is a slightly less debauched version of the aging playboy Mr. Sheen played on the CBS sitcom. He is also a pathetic divorced dad, like Alan, the mooching younger brother played by Jon Cryer.


In the pilot Charlie’s ex-wife, Jennifer (Shawnee Smith), taunts him with the success of her new boyfriend, who is taller, brawnier and has two Ferraris, one for town and the other for his beach house. “I can go the beach if I want to,” Charlie retorts. “I just can’t stay there overnight.”


The pilot opens with a broad wink at Mr. Sheen’s self-destructive battle with the television executives who fired him, killed off his character and replaced him with Ashton Kutcher, who helped raise the ratings higher than they were during Mr. Sheen’s heyday.


“You can’t fire me, I quit,” a wild-eyed Charlie says in a tight close-up. “You think you can replace me with some other guy, go ahead, it won’t be the same.”


The camera pulls back and shows Charlie hitting an inflatable punching bag, showing patients in his anger-management group a way to redirect their rage.


There’s no sarcastic housekeeper, but Charlie has a sardonic girlfriend, Kate (Selma Blair), his former therapist, who sleeps with him on condition that there be no emotional ties. “I will never love you,” he says as they romp in bed. “I will never love you, forever.”


Patients in the group-therapy sessions are stock sitcom characters — a crusty Vietnam veteran, a young gay man who needs help with his passive aggression, a sexy young woman who is angry at her cheating fiancé. Group therapy is an old joke that is making a comeback: next season on NBC, Matthew Perry plays a widower in a grief counseling


The dialogue has just enough profanity and risqué punch lines to pass muster on cable, but “Anger Management” is at heart a simple, old-fashioned sitcom, with raucous recorded laughter and predictable one-liners.


Basically it provides a safe format for Mr. Sheen to show that he is sane and almost his old, pre-warlock self. In interviews he has been giving to promote the show Mr. Sheen has managed to come off as rueful about his plunge but not really sorry about his disputes with CBS.


“Even though I was right, and there was a couple of things that they did that were wrong, there was a way to go about it that’s a little less than that,” he said on “Good Morning America” on Monday.


Mr. Sheen also said that he no longer took drugs but that he hadn’t given up drinking. “We live in a country where it’s always Miller time, you know, so what are you going to do?” he said. “It’s happy hour somewhere in the world.”


“Anger Management” isn’t a fresh start, exactly, but it doesn’t have to be a last chance. As Seth MacFarlane put it at a roast in Mr. Sheen’s honor last year, “Honestly, Charlie, I never thought I would live to see the night that you would live to see this night.”


Anger Management


FX, Thursday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time. Produced by Lionsgate. Created by Bruce Helford; Mr. Helford, Dave Caplan, Mark Burg, Joe Roth and Vince Totino, executive producers;


WITH: Charlie Sheen (Charlie Goodson), Selma Blair (Kate Wales), Shawnee Smith (Jennifer Goodson), Daniela Bobadilla (Sam Goodson), Noureen DeWulf (Lacy), Michael Arden (Patrick) and Derek Richardson (Nolan).