100 Favorite Shows: #27 — It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
“We should not be committing crimes based on beliefs that are two hours old.”
The first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia almost ended up being the only one. The show’s budget was minuscule, but the ratings were even smaller. To bolster the profile, FX asked for a big name to join the cast. The show’s creative team (made up of creators Rob McElhenney (who also plays Mac), Glenn Howerton (Dennis Reynolds), and Charlie Day (Charlie Kelly)) only allowed the casting of Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds, the “father” of Dennis and Dee (Kaitlin Olson). From there, it turned into the longest-running live-action sitcom in the history of American television, topping The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The story of the deplorable Philadelphians who run Paddy’s Pub and involve themselves in obnoxious schemes has been a mainstay on FX and FXX since 2005 and there are no plans to close the pub’s door(s) anytime soon.
(You wouldn’t want to read this essay on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia if you’re afraid of spoilers for the show.)
On It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, there are a number of recurring, revolving elements of the series that help define the characters. For Frank, it’s an affinity for a game called Night Crawlers. For Mac’s it’s an insistence that none of his sex toys actually get used. And for Charlie, it’s the concept of “Charlie work.” Charlie work is comprised of the various menial tasks around the bar that none of the rest of the gang wants to do, but Charlie is comfortable doing as gutter filth. Scrubbing bathrooms, covering glory holes, crawling through dumpsters. That’s Charlie work.
And by the time the tenth season of Sunny rolled around, the show’s creative team was ready to dedicate an entire episode to the concept. Aptly titled “Charlie Work,” the installment sees Charlie tasked with setting up Paddy’s Pub to appease the health inspector (Francesca P. Roberts) while simultaneously navigating the gang’s self-described “chicken, airline miles, and steak” scam. The result of the episode is a tracking shot of Charlie’s manic energy and janitorial ingenuity that results in a recorder imitating a carbon monoxide detector in G-sharp, Frank flushing his shoes and painting his feet black, the repeated slamming of a wobbly stool into the floor, a perfectly-timed vent moan from Mac, an increasingly sweaty bartender, a dumpster, and a truck driver (David Pressman) who just wants a bite to eat. As Charlie wheels and spins his way to a passing grade, he also pulls off the gang’s other scheme (which includes an arbitration process between the submissive Mac and the easily-pissed off Dennis to determine who actually came up with the plan that results in Mac muttering, “Dennis scratched me”), it becomes clear that Charlie may be illiterate, but when it comes to the dirty work, he might be a genius. If only there was some other applicable situation for his specific knowledge base.
Stylistically, “Charlie Work” resembles oner films like Rope and Birdman, drawing influence primarily from “Who Goes There” from True Detective. Comedically, with its juggling arc of threads Charlie needs to keep ironed, it’s in line with a wedding episode of Cheers. Though, Cheers would have never dared to show a glory hole.
That’s what has always set Sunny apart in the annals of sitcom lore. It’s the longest-running ever (in terms of seasons), but it hardly resembles anything that would have been seen on ABC or CBS in the ’80s, ’90s, or even today. Sunny took the formula of Seinfeld (a group of selfish misanthropes in the city make life unbearably worse for everyone they encounter) and ratcheted it up to the extreme extent of how white trash city scum actually live. When Mac burns his head in “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis,” a towel and duct tape are used to “heal” him. In “The Gang Buys a Boat,” Charlie swims off the dock in jeans, a track jacket, and a beanie. They don’t put Prince Family Paper out of business and they don’t steal marble rye bread loaves. They invade houses, kill dogs, ruin the lives of priests, and beat the shit out of neighborhood children. They’re distinctly terrible people who think they’re the coolest who ever walked the planet because they like to smash as much glass, listen to as much heavy metal (or Bryan Adams), and swim in as many pools as possible. They’re the people down the street who are always lighting off fireworks.
The gang was horrible enough in season one (comprised of just Dee, Dennis, Mac, and Charlie, at the time) when they encouraged underage drinking and took advantage of cancer diagnoses. In season two, they added Danny DeVito to the mix as Frank Reynolds, allowing his pseudo-tycoon status to fund their various schemes, even when the series was low-funded to the point that the camera work might as well have come from a flip phone and the music was distinctly royalty-free. DeVito portrayed a whole different kind of white trash. World weary and reckless beyond all reason, he illustrated the natural conclusion of the foursome from the first batch of seven arcs. Any shreds of sympathy they possessed for other human beings would surely be snuffed out by the time they reached Frank’s age.
Frank was the flagpole planted on top of a narcissistic garbage pile that had been building on television for years. This was not the same kind of comedy shepherded by Dick Van Dyke and Lucille Ball. Series like the aforementioned Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show had set the wheels in motion for a boom of narcissism in comedic characters. Few shows committed to it as readily as Sunny did. And when the actors on the series also comprised the sizable bulk of the show’s creative team, it allowed for them to play around with their creations. Rob McElhenney continuously remarks about how he loves to plum the depths of who Mac is. Charlie Day delights in any new character trait he can give to Charlie. Even Glenn Howerton couldn’t resist the pull of his all-time creation, Dennis, when he teased the idea that he’d leave the series for a full-time commitment to A.P. Bio instead.
Few episodes have shown the lengths they could drag their villains to as deftly as “Mac and Dennis Move to the Suburbs” from the eleventh season. The premise (as with most episodes from Sunny) is in the title. The city rats with sharpened edges from Philly decide to give the suburbs a go after Frank bets them a year’s rent that they can’t last a month. After a few days, it seems unlikely they’d even last a week. Mac and Dennis can hardly hack it when the pool filter and a mysterious chirping noise combine to be louder than all of the noises they heard back in their apartment. Of course, the noises caused by the pair of them vastly usurps anyone else in their cul-de-sac. This includes Nosy Wally (Steve Witting), who is nearly bludgeoned with a fire poker after remarking about the day being a “hot one” too many times. It’s in the Wally-centric moments when Howerton proves he can do a lot with the Dennis character — after eleven years of inhabiting him — with so little (“Yeah?!”) and so much (“You ever been in a storm like that?”)
It’s not only the noises that drive Dennis and Mac batty. It’s the endless barrage of Mac’s Famous (albeit imposing) Mac and Cheese, the traffic, the allusions to Bryan Adams. As Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” plays to a montage of their Jack Torrance-esque descents into madness, it’s obvious that the bet will not be won (which makes Dee’s side action and subsequent trip to the trash room even more fun), but the main fun comes in watching Mac and Dennis try to navigate it. To win, they only have to exist. But even that’s asking a lot when they slide to the extreme poles of their characters as Mac succumbs to psychological torture and Dennis to the temptation of murder. They fly off the handle (if they ever had a grip on it to begin with) so quickly over something as commonplace as the problems of homeowners. With the Paddy’s Pub gang, everything has to be taken to the highest degree possible, or else it just doesn’t seem to be worth doing.
The same is true of Sunny’s creators. Dennis, almost mirroring Howerton, frequently laments how tired he is of yelling. DeVito had no qualms about returning to the series, even when he almost drowned filming it. McElhenney gained weight for a season seven “Fat Mac” arc for no reason other than he thought it would be funny (he later becomes insanely ripped instead). As such, the implications of “Mac and Dennis Move to the Suburbs” are nothing compared to some of their other installments.
Dennis is acutely aware of the social traps his friends find themselves stuck in, but what he possesses in situational intuition, he lacks in self-awareness. Dennis is quick to identify when Charlie is being stupid, but still sincere and he knows he can throw out lines like, “The 1800s were a time of science” and receive no push back on them because his friends default to him like he’s the jailor in a game of Mafia. And even though his logic tracks in “The Gang Buys a Boat,” one cannot help but feel that Dennis is completely missing the mark of what his implication actually means.
Mac: “What do we need a mattress for?”
Dennis: “What do you mean what do we need a mattress for? Why in the hell do you think we just spent all that money on a boat? The whole purpose of buying the boat in the first place was to get the ladies nice and tipsy topside so we can take them to a nice comfortable place below deck and, you know, they can’t refuse. Because of the implication.”
Mac: “Oh. Okay. You had me going there for the first part, but the second half kinda threw me.”
Dennis: “Well, dude, think about it: She’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. You know, she looks around and what does she see? Nothing but open ocean. ‘There’s nowhere for me to run. What am I gonna do, say ‘no’?’”
It’s one of the series’ most iconic scenes, not only for the other implication regarding Dennis’ actions in open water, but also for the incredible back-and-forth between Dennis and Mac that mirror some of the better misunderstandings between Abbott and Costello (but those vets never came close to Sunny’s subject matter). The only thing funnier than Mac’s facial expressions throughout the scene are the slight twinges in Dennis’ neck as he becomes increasingly frustrated and grave as he zips through dialogue.
This moment was one of the earlier instances of Dennis’ duplicitous, serial killer tendencies. Over time, these attributes became stretched out more and more to the point where they were Dennis’ go-to trait when a joke was needed. Dee’s mawkish physicality was exaggerated. Mac’s questionable sexuality was heightened. Charlie’s brushes with fumes, drugs, and death increased in implausibility. Frank openly and cluelessly became a small-scale Philadelphia crime lord and sex mongrel. With each passing season, the purveyors of Paddy’s Pub became more and more flanderized. But on Sunny, it worked.
It wasn’t like on Friends when fans worried for Joey’s mental well-being by the end, even though he started out as a slightly slower, but still-with-it New York pretty boy. The Sunny gang continues to push their boundaries en route to achieving the natural result of how people like them would exist in society if they never experienced any consequences for their behavior.
In “The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis,” they strive to meet the attributes they believe are crucial for every great friend group. Whether it’s Scooby-Doo or Ghostbusters, they believe every great group has the brains (Mac), the looks (Dennis), the muscle (Frank), the “useless chick” (Dee), and the wild card (Charlie). (Only the Sunny characters would watch Ghostbusters and see Sigourney Weaver as useless.) For them, this formula is the recipe for scheming success. They can’t even see that it was the formula that doomed them when Frank’s van eventually explodes from the sheer amount of gas on board and the cut brakes (courtesy of Charlie, not understanding that a wild card should work on other people).
If Mac is the smartest person and Frank is the strongest person in a friend group, then that friend group is in immense danger. Charlie is the only one who seems to fit the mold of his archetype. Easily placated and quickly convinced to join in every scheme, Charlie is unpredictability in his “quirks” (which others may consider to be admissible evidence). He counts liquid, he loves ghouls, he writes songs about spiders in souls, he enjoys sleeping in the same bed as Frank. To live up to the wild card moniker, he dresses in a bolo tie in an attempt to pose as an oil tycoon when selling gasoline door-to-door. (“You best get to steppin’ because Johnny Law’s a-coming!”) His top moment comes when he is activated by Dennis against the gas station proprietor who tells them to stop filling buckets with gas. Charlie takes out a lighter and sneers, “So help me God, I’ll blow this place to kingdom come.” It’s moments like these that make Charlie a fan favorite. He’s not just a wild card; he’s the comedic relief. All the characters are funny, sure, but Charlie is the one who primarily exists to bring the show’s humor to insane heights. (Save Frank, the other characters do receive a humanizing moment from time to time, too. Charlie is just pure Philly trash. And he’s happy living that way.)
Because Charlie is so easily persuaded and appealed to, his changing loyalties are indicative of how frequently the gang churns through internal friendships. They’d never survive without one another, but they also constantly treat one another like complete shit. Dee is mocked for her poor timing in jokes and her uncoordinated dance moves (she’s even threatened by Dennis to be slapped in the teeth). The group openly discusses that they hate Mac. Even Frank is frequently left out of the antics because he doesn’t quite “fit in” with their “youth appeal” (again, no self-awareness. Not that Frank has any either. Regarding a little girl he wants to steal a vase from in “The Gang Gets Trapped,” he threatens, “I’m gonna whip this little bitch in the face if she makes a peep” and then hides in her stuffed animal collection). Their loyalties just shift to suit their own needs. Any one of them would trade the lives of their friends if it meant they could get an extra scoop of ice cream or an extra water bottle to coat a water slide with. The loyalties shift because they have no loyalty.
As the flanderization of characters increased to extreme degrees, the show grew even better. By about the tenth season, Sunny completely doubled down on the early notion on the series that the characters could exist for blank slate mouthpieces upon which the creative team could weave their way through the most prominent issues of modern society. Gun control, gendered bathrooms, movie fandom cultures, religious hypocrisy. There is no societal wave that Sunny will not wade into, keen on thrusting its collection of assholes into a new perspective on the world around them — liberal bullshit or otherwise.
That isn’t to say their carefully mapped out stories revolving around various schemes were not equally as entertaining. Quick to abandon their plots (which they initially obsess over), it’s entertaining when they acknowledge the long-standing desires that afflict them so randomly. Dennis has his heart set on buying a boat “for days,” which is a level of focus he’s aware that his friend group is not very accustomed to. (Frank and Charlie later mock the absurdity of how many schemes they actually concoct when they wear Russian fur hats with no explanation provided to the rest of the gang, who are entirely baffled about the motive behind the hats.)
When they do find themselves digging their heels in the dirt over a scheme, it tends to lead to them vastly over-inflating the importance of the plan. When they arrive at the bank to ask for a $300,000 loan to buy gasoline and do unclear things with it, they become offended when the teller (Eileen Fogarty) rejects their request. (Mac’s internalized misogyny comes through when he says offhandedly, “Is there any way we could talk to your boss? I think he would understand more better.”) They have no actual motivation to sell gas beyond “solving the gas crisis.” There is no know-how attributed to it. They believe it’s important; they believe they’re important; they ask for the loan. That’s all there is to it. It’s an incredibly stupid situation they find themselves in, but it’s entirely of their own doing.
The same is true for the schemes that unfold for the audience in real time, rather than us being clued into it from the outset of the episode. Examining “The Gang Gets Trapped,” which begins in media res, brings out Dennis saying exactly the words, “This is such a stupid situation” (an evergreen statement for them, really) as they’re stuck in a family’s closet after feeling the unquenchable need to sneak in and steal a vase from them. (That’s what happens when Frank funds their existence and they don’t need to actually tend bar.)
Dennis likes to pretend that he’s above the idiocy of his friends as Frank theorizes that the homeowner is cheating on her husband with Conan O’Brien and is trying to have Jay Leno whacked for what he did to Conan regarding The Tonight Show (“These are the theories of lunatics!”) and Charlie walks from the getaway van into the front door of the chaos (“How have we not been caught yet?”). However, as Mac (later posing as Indiana Jones figure-turned-Swedish plumber in an all-time great episode conclusion) reveals over the walkie talkie, Dennis claimed he’d be “in and out like a demon’s whisper.” Dennis can mock his friends all he wants, but he’s just as much in the muck with them — he decided to enter the home, too.
All in all, their self-awareness is lacking just as much as the family whose home they’re invading lacks an awareness of their surroundings. For as much as this is true, the meta lens shone on Sunny in its later seasons showed just how self-aware Howerton, McElhenney, Day, Olson, and DeVito were about the insanity their FX creations had wrought on the pop culture landscape writ large.
In the ninth season’s third episode, “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award,” Day, Howerton, and McElhenney wrote their own meta commentary on Sunny’s place in the television landscape, specifically as it connects to the Emmys (of which Sunny has only been nominated for three — all for stunt work — and won none). They touch upon a whole host of reasons as to why Paddy’s Pub (read: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) has never won an award: they don’t play the awards circuit, they’re too much on the fringe of society, they’ve been around for too many years, awards voting committees are not in touch with the humor of youths. They’re all reasons with varying degrees of validity, but the reality is that the Sunny gang is just too alienating.
When they make the trek from Paddy’s Pub to the trendy Sudz, the difference is clear. Everyone at Sudz is good-looking, adorned in colorful attire, and presented in bright lighting. The bar is introduced with “Call Me Maybe” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” playing in the background and the “characters” at Sudz are introduced with palatable, playful dialogue that sets up inherent conflicts in their own “Sudz” series. In the most network fashion possible, Greg (Ryan Gaul) asks Amanda (Whitney Hoy), “Hey Amanda. What’s wrong?” It’s almost like we’ve entered into the start of a different episode of Sudz on ABC (Modern Family is just one of Sunny’s many targets in the episode, which also includes digs at Mad Men, in the form of a period burlesque bar that wins a shit ton of awards for being edgy, and Louie, in the form of a new bar that “just opened up down the street”). It’s one that Mac remarks, “I’d like to come back next week to see if they do [get together].” It’s a more digestible world, sure, but it’s not the world we love Sunny for being.
Sunny is filled with some of the most vitriolic language and detestable actions of any comedy and it also manages to concoct a play in which a yellow-clad Dayman fights a questionable-in-every-way Nightman. It could never hope to compete with the Dunphys or the Gellers because it’s just too abrasive for that. Paddy’s Pub is a bar where a bunch of people yell over each other. And even though they recognize that and they see the exact ways they could change to become more successful, they’re entirely uninterested in that.
They didn’t become the longest-running live-action sitcom of all-time by catering to the awards bodies or network audiences. They did it by spitting on anyone who dared to encroach on their territory and open the blinds to let some sunlight in the bar. They consistently reinvent themselves while managing to remain true to their original spirit. And on occasion, they dare to reach further, as when Mac orchestrates a laugh-free, gorgeous interpretive dance to express his homosexuality to his unforgiving father (Gregory Scott Cummins). Only Frank understands Mac’s victory there. On Sunny, they vanquish the light brought by the Dayman before setting about to more schemes and more Charlie work. When the Nightman cometh, the Nightman always wins.
