A Sitcom Even a Nihilist Could Love
Like ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ before it, ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ breaks down all the genre’s conventions. So why aren’t more people watching it?
In a recent episode of the often overlooked and underwatched series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — now in its ninth season — the self-titled gang (Dennis, Dee, Frank, Mac, and Charlie, a group of some family, friends, all insane people who own a bar together) wonders (whines, really) about their lack of renown and prestige: How is it that they’ve never won best bar in the city? They head to a bar that’s won “numerous awards”: “Sudz,” brightly lit and filled with patrons eager to laugh and “oooh” together. There is an overly friendly, innocuously attractive bartender who delivers mild quips and engages in even more mild sexual banter with the too-cute-pixie waitress. Confused by the happiness and the artifice, the gang proceeds to decimate the stupidity before them, making fun of the proliferation of Zooey Deschanels (“Oh, she doesn’t need to be funny, she’s cute”) and the imposed racial ratios (“Wait, how are they’re not talking about their one black friend?”) among other sitcom contrivances. Yes, it’s a very meta moment —of course the characters are not just idly talking about bars or sitcoms. The show’s writers are kvetching about the fact that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has always been so egregiously overlooked.
What struck me as brilliant about this sendup was not just the astuteness of the insights or the harshness of the barbs, but the way this explicit satire shed light on the series’s general nature. Since its inception, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has worked to hold itself up as the anti-sitcom. This season brings to the surface what has been true all along: The gang has succeeded in creating the perfect antidote, or counterbalance, to the bright, neon-colored, archetypal, though often delightful, sitcoms of our generation.
Though the genre of the “sitcom” has widened its definition in recent years, the traditional template typically casts an appealingly quirky protagonist and surrounds him or her with a crazy cast of lovable nut jobs (e.g., colleagues, family, friends, neighbors) trying to navigate work and romance. There will definitely be a crazy/wild best friend. And a love interest. There is likely a male mentor with a gruff exterior, a hot secretary, zany underlings, a token African-American or Latino. And the show often follows this formula: A one- or two-episode issue arises demanding a resolution that inevitably brings the characters closer, and ends in some neat little lesson about life, self-esteem, love, family, and friends… rinse and repeat for about five, six, seven seasons, and await syndication.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia subverts this tradition. With no central character, the gang seeks out a wacked-out scheme that that only exacerbates the general unreality of their lives. In its earlier seasons, the gang’s antics ostensibly served their narcissism. They sought revenge, or prestige, or sex and money. For example, the gang thinks selling gas door to door will not only solve the gas crisis, but make a pretty penny doing so. It doesn’t. Dennis pretends to know a man who dies in the bar only to sleep with his granddaughter, and the gang reignites a ten-year-old rivalry unbeknownst to the unassuming nemesis, with drastic results. But now, nine seasons in, they scheme for scheming’s sake, to stave off boredom (which reaches its apotheosis in “Chardee MacDennis,” the masochistic and twisted game the gang invents to entertain themselves that entails physical and emotional torture among its rules). Nothing ever succeeds, nothing ever changes — no romance, no resolution, no consequences, no lessons learned. They remain—if not become more—narcissistic, racist, misogynistic, immoral, so that the formula is not one that leads them toward resolution, but instead toward absurdity until the gang jumps off their cliff, until the next scheme comes along. The show is nasty, uncomfortable, often despairing, unapologetic in its inappropriateness, and downright cynical, and yet it has been among the most consistently pleasurable and funny shows of the past decade, a feat that does indeed deserve endless accolades.
This purposeful nastiness and egoism stands in delicious and stark contrast to the wave of bright sincerity on display in sitcoms, and toward the general thrust of prime-time TV, like, say The Mindy Project, New Girl, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, Raising Hope, and even 30 Rock. Even South Park, which is often nastier than It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, inherently softens the brunt and discomfort of the show through the medium of cartoons and children, and in their balanced conclusions on the hot-button issues of the day.
Which is not to say that these shows aren’t enjoyable. Each of these sitcoms offers a riff off the essential formula. 30 Rock, though it works within the classic framework of sitcoms, wields much of its comedic brilliance and energy from playfully dismantling a genre stereotype, and then putting it back together by the end of the episode. As genius and perhaps sometimes cynical 30 Rock could be, it always came back to a bleeding emotional heart. Even Lutz, the office punching bag, ultimately is treated nicely, and accepted, as opposed to Rickety Cricket on Sunny, a former pastor whom the gang pushes into homelessness, then enables to become addicted to cocaine. 30 Rock still treats its characters with love, not as sociopaths, which, here, makes all the difference.
Parks and Rec, perhaps the cleverest show about real happiness on TV without venturing into cloying territory, works well because it follows the sitcom formula to its logical consequences. (Andy and April marry in haste, but it’s actually a marriage that appears to work well.) But sooner or later, the brightness of these shows begins to feel interchangeable. How many different will-they/won’t-they situations can we watch, how many amicable breakups among friends, how many life lessons about family, friendship, living, loving, and laughing can we swallow before bursting from a sugar overload? That you can draw a slightly jagged line between the stock characters on these sitcoms (Ron Swanson to Jack Donaghy, Liz Lemon to Jess Day, Mindy Lahiri, and Leslie Knope) displays the extent to which the genre tropes limit the boundaries of our network sitcoms so that these shows recycles a lot of the same stories and creative ideas.
Consequently, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—as the traditional network sitcom’s dark mirror image—provides the perfect balance for our sincerity-saturated culture. On the whole, despite what the New York Times might think about the prevalence of “hipster irony” among this generation (see this much discussed editorial about irony as the ostensible ethos of this generation), in truth, we now love and cherish sincerity, and tend to see cynicism as pathetic and unenlightened. Author David Foster Wallace famously mused that:
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue.
When Foster Wallace wrote this in the early nineties, he couldn’t fathom how naïveté, sincerity, and a genuine sense of real moral and emotional issues would return. Yet it’s not just the avant-garde bringing back naïveté; society on the whole is returning back to a time of almost insipid easy sincerity, full of pat moralistic lessons, easy resolutions, and an obsession with happiness in our shows (albeit all well written). It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and shows now springing up in its wake (e.g., Workaholics, East Bound and Down), provides a playful antidote to the brightness of these other shows. Even the gang’s potentially most genuine moments — their early, admittedly weaker, attempts at social commentary — vanished as the gang dropped all pretenses to satire and transitioned to using political issues as fodder for schemes. (Case in point: Season one’s episode “Gun Fever” had the gang protecting themselves like idiots with guns after a break in. In season nine, we see the gang back with “Gun Fever Too: Still Hot,” but here, there is no real plan to protect themselves, no break-in to precipitate their gun fever. They are simply bored and want a scheme, i.e., get more guns on the street after hearing some nut talk about it on TV, just to have something to do together, which, as you could imagine, doesn’t go well.) Current issues are now just pretenses for plans, for a chance to dull the boredom.
Because if any sin can be said to exist in the amoral world of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it is the sin of boredom, which is perhaps its most scathing satire and commentary in the world of sitcoms. A sitcom essentially takes life situations and makes them less boring through unlikely, quirky, and slightly absurd twists. Something always happens in a sitcom — someone gets sick, or a miscommunication causes problems — but there is always a resolution, and in hindsight, the conflict was wholly innocuous. Sitcoms often try to depict TV life as a considerably less boring version of our lives, but that their reach is so limited often makes the shows boring in of themselves. (A county fair gone awry, Tracy Jordan is acting up again!). That our sitcoms, embroidered versions of our lives, start to feel boring is a testament to the prevalent sterility and innocuousness of our daily lives (Wake up, go to work, come home, family time, watch TV, et cetera). It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if only for a mere twenty-two minutes a week, gives us a chance to enter a world without stakes; their idle schemes are the elixir for our idle generation. For those twenty-two minutes we don’t need to pretend about how boring our lives can be. We can accept it,rage against ennui, and become nihilists: throw glass bottles, blow up cars, be mean to homeless people, make fun of religion, not care about other people, try all of the drugs especially (and frequently) huffing glue, go on welfare just for the fun of it, make fun of molestation, get black-out drunk, dabble in possible incest, hang out under the bridge or in sewers, and generally just act like the stupid, selfish, destructive, children we all want to be from time to time.
Yet to reduce the merits of the show to a sitcom antidote does a disservice to the inherent playfulness and insularity of the show. When the show first came out, people compared it to Seinfeld — albeit a “Seinfeld on crack.” While Seinfeld revolutionized the sitcom in many ways, it still worked and created within the framework of certain genre expectations. Sunny, though, having the luxury to come after Seinfeld, has been able to push the twisted logic of Seinfeld to its ultimate conclusions: a true show about nothing, or insanity for insanity’s sake. (That Curb and Sunny fit so nicely together makes sense; Curb also pushes the formula and logic of Seinfeld to absurd territory.) Seinfeld still existed and worked within a world we can recognize. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, though it obviously takes place in this world, has been able to create its own insular world with its own rules and logic and lack of real-world consequences. The show inspires a devoted fan base who all know the strange twist and turns of certain themes and the growing strange mythology of the characters, their exploits, their family, and the people they use and abuse. (Reading the deadpan description of the extent of Charlie’s illiteracy on Wikipedia is often as funny as the show itself.)
Past all of this analysis, the show continues to work so well because of the gang’s total and almost religious devotion to their characters. (We only just learned that Dee was institutionalized, for lighting her roommate on fire.)
The gang’s self-involvement reached its perfect peak in last season’s “The Gang Gets Analyzed.” On a trip to Dee’s psychiatrist, each member of the gang agrees to a personal one-on-one session. The result is pure joy: Each character, with their eight years of mythology, is distilled into their “purest” selves: their latent disorders and twisted natures. Watching Charlie’s session is an instantaneous infusion of happiness (“bleach smells good, it tastes good”), but the truth is that each one is impeccable. Dennis is more sociopathic, controlling, and egoistic, Dee more desperate and pathetic, Charlie more absurd, Mac now lacking any semblance of self-awareness and more insecure, emotionally volatile and just stupid, and of course, Frank is the essence of strange, lovable depravity. It’s hard to imagine another show that could showcase each member of the cast for such a sustained period of time and have it be anywhere near as hilarious. And of course, to cap it all off, the ultimate scheme: The gang is completely apathetic about their diagnoses and dysfunction; they just want the embattled psychiatrist to decide who has to wash the dishes from the gang’s dinner get-together. (She chooses Dee, who then smashes the plates in pitch-perfect indignant rage. Excellent.)
So how do you love increasingly insane and psychopathic people? I’m not sure any one answer would explain their endless appeal. You need to watch for yourself. But one famous encounter should suffice. Sweet Dee suffers a heart attack, about which no one cares past the fact that they all realize they don’t have health insurance and are woefully unhealthy. Charlie and Mac offer to work for a company and split the salary just for the insurance (Charlie writes TCB, taking care of business on his résumé, a shared résumé). Frank, who has insurance, gets every medicine under the sun only to find himself institutionalized a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—but he loves wearing a medical gown because it allows his “ass to breathe.” And Dennis and Dee decide to get healthy but, finding exercise challenging, opt for cosmetic enhancements, resulting in Mexican collagen then inserted into Dennis’s eye. All of which culminates in Charlie uncovering a cover-up of a conspiracy in his place of work, only to find out from Mac that there is no conspiracy and Charlie has lost his mind. The scene was used to great effect here to show the overlap between Charlie going mad and Carrie breaking down on Homeland, highlighting the absurdity for absurdity’s sake of Sunny.
As the show approaches its 100th episode, it is worth praising their incredible accomplishment that will never receive formal accolades. Even if the Academy won’t or can’t acknowledge the greatness of 100 episodes with few (if really any) real misses, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, has certainly influenced television culture. The boys from Workaholics have explicitly expressed their indebtedness to the Sunny gang, and other shows could do so as well. The gang brought lewd, absurd, cynical insanity back, it gave us an outlet for our generational id, and consistently provides the oddly most lovable sociopathic characters on TV. I like life in Paddy’s Pub and I can’t thank them enough. Cheers, gang, and here’s to many more.
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