The Improbable Longevity of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”
Sometime in the mid-two-thousands, the actor Rob McElhenney sat for an on-camera interview with FX. The cable network had recently, to his palpable astonishment, green-lit a scrappy comedy that he’d shot with two friends, called “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” In the segment, McElhenney—scruffy, his dark-brown hair parted down the middle—explains the show’s premise: A gaggle of friends co-owns a flagging Irish bar in Philadelphia called Paddy’s Pub. McElhenney struggles to verbalize “Sunny” ’s conceit beyond that. “To get into specifics is difficult, because there is no real situation,” the newly minted showrunner says. “I mean, we find ourselves in different situations every week.” Suddenly coy, he offers, “I would say this: that if you are easily offended, you might want to not tune in.” McElhenney leaves it there, flashing a wide grin.
His vague warning undersold the degree to which “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” entered the world deliberately courting controversy. The protagonists, known as “the gang,” cut a figure closer to frenemies than friends. They plot and scheme, sometimes together and usually at odds with one another, each driven entirely by self-interest. Notably, the show premièred, in 2005—early in George W. Bush’s second term and mere months after the début, on NBC, of “The Office,” a sacred text of the millennial hopecore era—with an episode entitled “The Gang Gets Racist.” The titular gang comprises Mac (McElhenney), a closeted wannabe tough guy; the narcissistic prepster Dennis (Glenn Howerton); Dennis’s chronically unsure fraternal twin, Dee (Kaitlin Olson); and the bar’s buffoonish janitor, Charlie (Charlie Day). Together, they hire a man from Dee’s acting class, Terrell (Malcolm Barrett), who is Black, to be a doorman at their bar as a way of proving that they aren’t racist. Terrell, who is gay and doubles as a night-club promoter, brings in scores of drinkers to their perpetually sleepy pub, transforming it into Philadelphia’s trendiest gay bar. Stunned, the gang lobs homophobic diatribes, fires Terrell, and sabotages their own success, while cluelessly reinforcing the same racism that they had defensively railed against, in addition to some reprehensible homophobia.
“Sunny,” throughout its seventeen-season run (its eighteenth season premières on August 17th), has concocted all manner of depraved schemes for its despicable antiheroes: hunting a former man of the cloth (whom they’ve driven into homelessness) for sport; locking their enemies inside an apartment that’s on fire; trying to profit from a baby they’ve found in a dumpster. Flagrantly practicing an especially ribald strain of cringe comedy that brushes several third rails, often simultaneously, the show could have been a disastrous gambit. But “Sunny” has managed to (largely) avert this fate with an act of comedic divination: it leans into ripping satire at the precise moment when the situation at hand—and, by association, the show itself—appears unsalvageable. “I think we get away with it because the characters are never rewarded,” Howerton once said in an interview. “They’re always losing. They always wind up in the same place they started in.”
Even more improbable is the fact that, by season count, “Sunny” is the longest-running live-action comedy in American TV history. (In distant second place is “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” which ran for fourteen seasons.) The series has not faced cancellation in a cultural sense, even as social mores have morphed over its two decades on air. Nor has the show disappeared in a corporate bloodbath, despite substantial ownership changes at its parent company. (“Sunny” first aired on FX, then moved to anchor FX’s spinoff network FXX—targeted at younger adult audiences—when it launched, in 2013. Disney acquired Twentieth Century Fox, which included FX Networks, in 2019; several years later, it acquired a hundred per cent stake in Hulu, where the show has streamed for the better part of two decades.) It helps that the longtime head of FX, John Landgraf, is a champion of the show; when he took over the network, in 2004, Landgraf brought in edgy original programming that could be made cheaply, including “Sunny,” to rouse the struggling company. FX was one of the lowest-rated cable networks among the eighteen-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic after it débuted. Less than two decades later, Variety reported, the network was ranked sixth out of a hundred and four networks for that same age group. A few years into its run, “Sunny” also began amassing a cult fan base that tends to communicate via vocal stims of its most recognizable in-jokes.
The eighteenth season of “Sunny” hews to a familiar formula: high jinks catalyzed by ulterior motives; callbacks to long-standing bits, like Charlie (who habitually eats cat food and something inexplicably called “milk steak,” with a side of jelly beans) perhaps being a secret genius; edgy jokes about thorny cultural issues; and scenes best watched through one’s fingers, such as one in which Dee and Dennis sneak into a morgue to rip a thumb off a corpse, only to realize that the digit is from the wrong body. Viewed as a collective, the new season offers an explanation for “Sunny” ’s stubborn endurance, which has little to do with how the show inserts its finger directly into sockets. Buried within the gang’s self-absorbed pickles, petty obsessions, and moral bankruptcy is a thrum of genuine knowingness, a metatextual edge that is at its most unsparing when the show’s sights are trained on—what else?—itself.
McElhenney (who legally shortened his last name to Mac last year), Howerton, and Day first dreamed up “Sunny” when they were scraping together livings from bit parts on soap operas and procedurals. Turned off by the meagre roles that Hollywood had for them, the friends decided to make a show for laughs, about three twentysomething actors trying to make it in Los Angeles. They used Howerton and Day’s cheap digital camcorders. When they weren’t acting in front of the camera, they were behind it or holding the boom mike, learning as they went. Dubbed “It’s Always Sunny on TV,” the tape made its way to FX.
Executives loved the show’s winking humor, but worried about its familiar setting. In the early two-thousands, HBO’s roster featured three shows that addressed Hollywood’s casual cruelties: “The Comeback,” “Entourage,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” NBC had invested in the “Friends” spinoff “Joey,” which followed its titular character, an actor, as he moved to L.A. So the “Sunny” team ditched that idea and changed the show’s setting to Philadelphia, where Mac had grown up. Their characters were written as night-life-industry colleagues, not actors. (The show’s revamped name, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” is a pseudo joke: the sun-drenched series is shot predominantly in L.A., save for the odd episode and B-roll in its eponymous city.) The first season was filmed on a scrappy budget of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars per episode, a fraction of what it cost to make a network sitcom at the time.
The series received a lukewarm reception from critics and earned middling ratings upon its release, in August, 2005. In the Philadelphia Daily News, Ellen Gray panned “Sunny” as a show that “simply isn’t funny enough often enough to justify its rather labored envelope-pushing.” The New York Daily News was less generous, concluding that “just because you can put something on TV doesn’t mean you should.” Despite the low ratings, Landgraf liked the show—and that it cost next to nothing to make. Ahead of the comedy’s second season, FX brought on Danny DeVito to play Dennis and Dee’s impish, absentee businessman father, Frank, in hopes that his presence would bring in more viewers. (Landgraf and DeVito were two co-founders of Jersey Films, a TV-production company they started in 1999.) The inclusion of Frank, portrayed by DeVito with a rollicking sleaze, gave the writers more latitude to probe intergenerational disputes, corrosive familial dynamics, and debauchery: he has a penchant for having sex in dumpsters, he cuts his nails with an unwashed “toe knife,” and admits, at one point, to having defecated in the bed that he shares with his roommate, Charlie.
Viewership rates ticked up after FX released the show on DVD and beefed up its marketing toward college students; the show also found a niche audience on Hulu, which launched to the public in early 2008. On the cusp of the Obama era, the kind of sitcoms that were being made moved from canned network fare to cheery mockumentaries and programs stuffed with laugh-a-minute zingers. “Sunny” ’s anti-sitcom bona fides were beloved among fans who appreciated its subversive streak. But the program still continues to float somewhat under the radar, never having found massive mainstream popularity via ratings or awards—an exclusion that has not gone unnoticed by the show. An early episode features a jab that Mac directs at Dennis and Charlie which reads as a veiled comment about Hollywood’s inability to grasp “Sunny” itself: “Our problem is that we don’t stick to that basic format, and that gets us into trouble,” Mac says. “So what you’re saying is that by breaking from that format, we’re actually limiting our ability to be as successful?” Dennis asks. Another episode, in which the pals attempt to win an award for best bar, parallels the comedy’s perpetual shutout from the Emmy Awards. (It has received only three nominations, all for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a comedy program; it has won none.) Two years ago, the actors of “Sunny” finally made it onto the Emmys stage—as presenters. “Wait, hang on, have you guys been doing this every single year without us?” Day asked the crowd from the stage. “Maybe they got some trophies backstage that they just, like, forgot to give us.”
“Sunny” frequently draws comparisons to the profane animated comedy “South Park,” which addresses Zeitgeisty tensions with a similar irreverence. The difference is that “Sunny” does not frame the issues it’s tackling as to-the-minute shocks to the status quo, as “South Park” often does. When “Sunny” introduces culture-war topics, like #MeToo, and political issues, such as gun control, it mines humor from how these topical conversations further elucidate the gang’s depravity. In one of the new episodes, for instance, Dee becomes a ruthless marketing executive who coerces her intern into sex by asking him, “Do you believe women?” Another Season 18 episode ostensibly riffs on the right’s cavalier handling and selective perception of the Epstein files, and subtly mocks vaccine skepticism when the gang insists that they “did their own research.”
To me, the closest sibling to “Sunny” is not “South Park” but, rather, “Peep Show,” a now defunct British comedy that was the longest-running program of its kind on Channel 4. Shot in an excruciating P.O.V. style, the show tracks two horribly selfish flatmates whose friendship—rooted in history and a waning sense of obligation—is best described as “lead weights dragging each other down,” as one of them puts it. When “Sunny” first aired, it zagged away from dominant sitcom hits such as “Friends,” with weekly conundrums that neither tested their characters’ friendships nor reinforced their long-standing bonds. It wouldn’t suffice to characterize “Sunny,” either, as a show about nothing except observing daily absurdities, as “Seinfeld” is. The gang never learns anything, in fact, save for new ways to be horribly cruel to one another—taking the “Peep Show” frenemy ambiguity one step further—with Dee a particularly frequent target: the others repeatedly dismiss her by calling her a “bird” and, in one of their meanest schemes, the gang tries to help her out of a depressive episode by leading her to believe that she’s finally become a star on the comedy circuit. By digging into the cruelty that reflects darker shades of our society, the show exposes it.
“Sunny” shares another, more controversial kinship with “Peep Show.” In 2020, a spate of sitcoms on streaming platforms and in syndication, including “Community,” “30 Rock,” and “Golden Girls,” pulled episodes that showed their characters using black- and brownface; likewise, FX took down five episodes of “Sunny.” The decision divided fans: some approved of the decision, whereas others advocated for the episodes’ return to streaming, so long as they included a disclaimer about the racially offensive content. In 2021, Mac addressed the controversy by stating that his “barometer is off for what’s appropriate sometimes in situations because, like, we’ve spent fifteen years making a show about the worst people on the planet, and because it’s satire, we lean so heavily into this idea.” (The episodes remain unavailable on streaming platforms.)
In a Season 15 episode, “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7,” which originally aired in 2021, the show addresses its own regretful use of blackface by lampooning Hollywood’s self-congratulatory stance during the racial reckonings of 2020. After the library removes the gang’s “Lethal Weapon” tribute films (these films-within-the-show feature in some of the earlier “Sunny” episodes that have been removed from streaming) because of the blackface that Mac used in portraying Roger Murtaugh, played by Danny Glover in the original film series, the group reflects on their racism with hollow sincerity: “We’ve also done a lot of growing,” Dee says. Mac later announces that he would be “magnanimously taking a step back” from the role of Murtaugh. He stops, waiting for applause. “I’m doing something anti-racist, and I think I deserve praise for that, do I not?” The episode ends with a behind-the-scenes documentary about the gang’s making of “Lethal Weapon 7,” called “White Saviors.”
Since 2020, an ongoing cultural rejection of inclusive language and actions—exacerbated by a Presidential Administration that revels in liberal and left-leaning citizens’ anger at its intentionally cruel treatment of immigrants, people of color, and L.G.T.B.Q.+-identifying people—has seeped into our culture. The visible brutality of Trump 2.0, in a sense, has caught up to the universe that “Sunny” inhabits: a place where its characters get a clear kick out of the barbaric pains that they inflict on one another. Following a string of uneven seasons, “Sunny” ’s eighteenth outing finds fertile terrain by toying with this pronounced sociopolitical pendulum swing—but not by vindicating its characters, who, it’s implied, might share similarly cold-blooded impulses. The new episodes skewer MAGA’s desire to “own the libs” even if it’s at great cost to themselves, the movement’s rampant cultural apathy, and the false promises of nostalgic revisionist histories.
The season begins with a two-parter (spoilers ahead) about Frank marrying the billionaire Sam (Carol Kane), whom he met when the two competed on “The Golden Bachelor,” in the finale of the previous season. Sam agrees to secretly share her fortune with Dennis and Dee, so long as the wedding happens. One ill-fated bout of flesh-eating bacteria later, Sam dies—but not before Dee and Dennis, to insure that they get their cut, prop her body up at the altar so that Frank unknowingly marries her corpse. While figuring out the legal bureaucracies surrounding Sam’s money, the working-class siblings complain about their physical proximity to their broke friends. Dennis’s disdainful outcries—“We’re surrounded by poverty, Dee . . . hold your breath because you can catch it, it’s like a disease you can catch!”—poke at both the ruling class and blue-collar Americans who might vote against policies that could help ease the ill effects of corporate greed on their own lives. Although never stated outright, Dee and Dennis’s exaggerated get-rich-quick plot smacks of risky financial endeavors, such as the rise of dystopian prediction markets. And the season’s most idiotic gag, with various characters dressed up for Frank’s wedding in Colonel Sanders-esque Western black-ribbon bow ties, functions as an indictment of our culture’s complacent incuriosity: the gang would rather look ridiculous in the ribbon ties than learn how to tie a bow tie.
But the newest crop of “Sunny” episodes takes on a trenchant precision by prodding at a strain of culture that’s smitten with the fantasy of nostalgia and calls on the right to “make America great again.” In a standout new episode, “The War on Alcohol,” the gang, after lamenting that booze sales have waned at the bar, decides to bring blue- and white-collar workers together for a happy hour to remind them of alcohol’s pleasures. The scheme goes sideways, as the friends realize that the nature of work has changed, with the rise of remote jobs and automation and the decline of communal gatherings, and that culture no longer values excessive drinking—which, as they viscerally come to see, could lead to dire consequences such as injury, harassment, and death. Moreover, the narrative seems to suggest that romanticizing the past makes it no easier to trudge into an uncertain future.
One welcome surprise: a newly installed automated beer machine garners a substantial profit from non-alcoholic-beer sales. “Maybe we’re thinking about this whole thing all wrong,” Mac says, in a moment of brief clarity. “Maybe we should embrace a modern workplace environment.” But that would mean they learned something. The gang hauls the contraption to the front curb and pours their non-alcoholic beers into it. Satisfied, they head back inside the bar to find “a real beer.” Never growing, it seems, goes down as easy as a lager. ♦