4 out of 5

Created by: Rob McElhenney

covers seasons 1 – 15

I believe I’ve shared this origin story before, so pardon the repetition.

I joined the Always Sunny bandwagon right around when the season 3 DVD was released, which looks to be late 2009. I was staunchly a movies-only dude; I had some DVDs of shows the were important to me (Married… With Children; Ren & Stimpy), but swore of most of what was then current TV as lesser-than film, because I was clearly super awesome. I worked in a music / movie retail store at the time, and knew Always Sunny from stocking it on the shelves: it was that show with Danny DeVito, and it appealed to the cool kids, and it was on FX, which lumped it in (in my mind) with a particular type of “smart” dumb comedy that I didn’t think was very smart at all.

Circumstances occurred where I was officially introduced to the season 1 & 2 DVD set. Fully expecting to bite my tongue during unfunny segments, I was instead… instantly converted. Like, bought the set myself soon after, and then season 3, and starting touting this as the only funny show on TV. People would mention Arrested Development; I’d tell them to fuck off. So without a doubt, had I been writing a series overview at that point, five stars down the line. And this likely would’ve remained true up through about season 6, even though I’d felt a slight shift in style with season 4, when the joke of the world’s most ignorant, awful people operating in the normal world resulted in a series of calamities for, essentially, an innocent bystander; so we’re sort of laughing at another person’s misfortune, instead of laughing at the central Sunny cast. Still, this shift would be absorbed into the show’s m.o., as it mostly maintains a memory of those it harms, and so again turns the joke inward: that Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Dee (Kaitlin Olson), and Frank (Danny DeVito) have zero recollection / awareness of their impact… unless it ends up impacting them, at which point fingers are pointed everywhere else for blame.

And then season 7 – the “fat Mac” season. If seasons 1-3 are an era, and 7 is the end of the next era, when the oddball character development of the series is pushed for a gag where Rob gained a ton of weight for a conceptual laugh regarding Mac “cultivating mass.” (But also Rob’s joke that, for the most part, none of the Sunny characters really care about any of this within the context of the show, whereas any other show would do “a very special episode” or somesuch about such a change.) While season 7 has, still, a lot of brilliant episodes, and this physical commitment was impressive – especially considering that Rob would lose the weight for the next season – this kind of top-down concept, lain over the entire season, suggested another forthcoming shift. I don’t quite have the theory crystallized, but it’s writing Sunny by vibes. While the move was a character move, it seemed to encourage getting more extreme with character and episode shifts in general. So, ironically, what could be considered an “arc” resulted in the opposite thing happening over all: the show no longer felt like a consistent crew and concept, but rather foisted the Sunny template into different scenarios. On the one hand, this opens things up for a mostly brilliant season 8; on the other hand, episodes feel stretched thin more often, requiring rewatches to appreciate versus the instant impact of the earlier seasons. It’s still, quite frequently, amazing, but the overall, episode-to-episode experience is less even, and perhaps with less “peaks;” less gut-busting – for me, anyway – moments.

But: there are more hands on the show. More eyes on it. Its audience seems to skew college-aged, and so maybe my sense of humor has changed along the way, as have those of the creators. All those initial ideas for episodes have been run through, and so you keep it fresh with oddball ones, where characters are kinda like themselves, but you take liberties to land the joke. Maybe certain actors are worn down over a long run; Glenn, at one point, was to leave the show. Charlie picked up some movie credits; Kaitlin and Glenn and Rob all have other TV shows. It’s impossible for the style of the show to not change, just given the passage of time, but also the wandering focus of its creatives. That said, fantastic episodes occur at a ridiculous clip, even 15 seasons in, and with the behind-the-scenes exposure we’ve gotten with a podcast the crew started during that time, you get confirmation of the passions fueling the series – and also exposure to everything I’m saying above: acknowledgement that things change.

What’s impressive is that the show has tried to roll with those changes – while maybe not always successfully – instead of forcing it into a box from nearly 20 years ago, when we were all pretty different people.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia features a crew of friends, the “gang” – Mac, Dennis, and Charlie – and Dee, Dennis’ sister, and Frank, Dennis and Dee’s father kinda sorta, and chronicles their nonsense lives while running a bar in Philadelphia. But these chronicles are rarely about running the bar, and instead all the schemes they run in an attempt to remain the most self-centered people alive. The only reason this works – the only reason it’s not cruel, when they fake having cancer, or cause a pastor to become a homeless sex worker – is because the joke is always on them, and they never even realize it. They are never “in” on the joke.

Depending on when you start the show will probably determine your favorite seasons, as it’s shifted from grounded-but-ridiculous to variations of ridiculous-ridiculous along the way. But because the core team (Rob, Glenn, Charlie) has remained intimately involved the whole while, the core conceit of the show has remained intact: these are the worst people on the planet. And it’s okay to laugh at them.