5 out of 5 (episodes and Bluray)

Created By: Rob McElhenny

That’s fine, keep the seasons short if you need to to keep them perfect, I shan’t complain.  So post sorta’ maybe peaking (in terms of “it” factor impact) with the Nightman musical, the Sunny crew seemed to struggle with where / how to aim their humor.  There were frequent successes, but as more writers scrambled onboard, some episodes just seemed to settle into a ‘wacky’ formula, and then we were seeing Charlie in ‘Horrible Bosses,’ and there was a wonder if this was going to start falling apart sooner rather than later.  Revisiting those seasons, they’re actually funnier than I recall, but it required a transition in expectations to make them work.  Season 6 started to climb back up, and Season 7 was close to being pretty damn great again, the Fat Mac gag working perfectly to off-settle the show just enough to get the creative juices, it seemed, flowing, and perhaps assist the various writers in better grasping Rob’s vision of Sunny as the anti-comedy and not just the Weird and Rude crew.

At 10 eps, season 8 is the shortest yet, but every episode here scores, and better yet, they all feel like original ideas, and not just forced exploration of taboos.  There are some tricks that they won’t be able to repeat again (as well), with gags from older episodes reappearing either for parody’s sake (‘The Gang Recycles Their Trash,’ which reuses jokes and bits from several past episodes) or for the sake of building on and warping previous ideas (‘Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer’) with the slightly more limber reality the current incarnation of the show lives in.  The ‘Wedding Massacre’ is perfect – a legit Halloween episode in the gang’s flashback format that awesomely continues to up the ante during its runtime (and has a totally-didn’t-notice-it Guillermo del Toro cameo!), ‘Pop-Pop’ takes a devious turn that only Sunny could work, and season closer ‘The Cereal Defense’ makes me gasp with its ridiculously logical arguments against science, evolution, and donkey brains.

No down moments, no jokes that miss, no odd 2-parters.

And for us Blu-ray purchasers, post the initial season 1-3 DVDs, extras have been pretty pithy on these things.  And Season 7 was sorta’ frustrating, with lackluster commentary and a pointless Artemis bit.  Season 8, while maybe not packed, actually has two original bits that are laugh-out-loud funny – A Golden Girls spoof with Mac and Charlie’s moms, and an instructional video from Frank Reynolds on how to be a dick of a CEO (a.k.a. a Warthog).  The gag reel is as heart-warming as ever, but it was actually the commentary that made me happiest here.  It’s not particularly informative, but the change is that the guys seemed interested in being there, and were engaged when commenting, even if it didn’t amount to more than chit-chat.  Which, to me, solidified the feeling that they’re back in the trenches for the show… at least for now.