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\u2019d shot with two friends, called \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.\u201d In the segment, McElhenney\u2014scruffy, his dark-brown hair parted down the middle\u2014explains the show\u2019s premise: A gaggle of friends co-owns a flagging Irish bar in Philadelphia called Paddy\u2019s Pub. McElhenney struggles to verbalize \u201cSunny\u201d\u00a0\u2019s conceit beyond that. \u201cTo get into specifics is difficult, because there is no real situation,\u201d the newly minted showrunner says. \u201cI mean, we find ourselves in different situations every week.\u201d Suddenly coy, he offers, \u201cI would say this: that if you are easily offended, you might want to not tune in.\u201d McElhenney leaves it there, flashing a wide grin.<\/p>\n
His vague warning undersold the degree to which \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia\u201d entered the world deliberately courting controversy. The protagonists, known as \u201cthe gang,\u201d 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 premi\u00e8red, in 2005\u2014early in George W. Bush\u2019s second term and mere months after the d\u00e9but, on NBC, of \u201cThe Office,\u201d a sacred text of the millennial hopecore era\u2014with an episode entitled \u201cThe Gang Gets Racist.\u201d The titular gang comprises Mac (McElhenney), a closeted wannabe tough guy; the narcissistic prepster Dennis (Glenn Howerton); Dennis\u2019s chronically unsure fraternal twin, Dee (Kaitlin Olson); and the bar\u2019s buffoonish janitor, Charlie (Charlie Day). Together, they hire a man from Dee\u2019s acting class, Terrell (Malcolm Barrett), who is Black, to be a doorman at their bar as a way of proving that they aren\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSunny,\u201d throughout its seventeen-season run (its eighteenth season premi\u00e8res on August 17th), has concocted all manner of depraved schemes for its despicable antiheroes: hunting a former man of the cloth (whom they\u2019ve driven into homelessness) for sport; locking their enemies inside an apartment that\u2019s on fire; trying to profit from a baby they\u2019ve 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 \u201cSunny\u201d 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\u2014and, by association, the show itself\u2014appears unsalvageable. \u201cI think we get away with it because the characters are never rewarded,\u201d Howerton once said in an interview. \u201cThey\u2019re always losing. They always wind up in the same place they started in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even more improbable is the fact that, by season count, \u201cSunny\u201d is the longest-running live-action comedy in American TV history. (In distant second place is \u201cThe Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,\u201d 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. (\u201cSunny\u201d first aired on FX, then moved to anchor FX\u2019s spinoff network FXX\u2014targeted at younger adult audiences\u2014when 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 \u201cSunny,\u201d 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 d\u00e9buted. 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, \u201cSunny\u201d also began amassing a cult fan base that tends to communicate via vocal stims of its most recognizable in-jokes.<\/p>\n
The eighteenth season of \u201cSunny\u201d 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 \u201cmilk steak,\u201d with a side of jelly beans) perhaps being a secret genius; edgy jokes about thorny cultural issues; and scenes best watched through one\u2019s 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 \u201cSunny\u201d\u00a0\u2019s stubborn endurance, which has little to do with how the show inserts its finger directly into sockets. Buried within the gang\u2019s 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\u2019s sights are trained on\u2014what else?\u2014itself.<\/p>\n
McElhenney (who legally shortened his last name to Mac last year), Howerton, and Day first dreamed up \u201cSunny\u201d 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\u2019s cheap digital camcorders. When they weren\u2019t acting in front of the camera, they were behind it or holding the boom mike, learning as they went. Dubbed \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny on TV,\u201d the tape made its way to FX.<\/p>\n
Executives loved the show\u2019s winking humor, but worried about its familiar setting. In the early two-thousands, HBO\u2019s roster featured three shows that addressed Hollywood\u2019s casual cruelties: \u201cThe Comeback,\u201d \u201cEntourage,\u201d and \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm.\u201d NBC had invested in the \u201cFriends\u201d spinoff \u201cJoey,\u201d which followed its titular character, an actor, as he moved to L.A. So the \u201cSunny\u201d team ditched that idea and changed the show\u2019s setting to Philadelphia, where Mac had grown up. Their characters were written as night-life-industry colleagues, not actors. (The show\u2019s revamped name, \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cSunny\u201d as a show that \u201csimply isn\u2019t funny enough often enough to justify its rather labored envelope-pushing.\u201d The New York Daily News was less generous, concluding that \u201cjust because you can put something on TV doesn\u2019t mean you should.\u201d Despite the low ratings, Landgraf liked the show\u2014and that it cost next to nothing to make. Ahead of the comedy\u2019s second season, FX brought on Danny DeVito to play Dennis and Dee\u2019s 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 \u201ctoe knife,\u201d and admits, at one point, to having defecated in the bed that he shares with his roommate, Charlie.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cSunny\u201d\u00a0\u2019s 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\u2014an 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\u2019s inability to grasp \u201cSunny\u201d itself: \u201cOur problem is that we don\u2019t stick to that basic format, and that gets us into trouble,\u201d Mac says. \u201cSo what you\u2019re saying is that by breaking from that format, we\u2019re actually limiting our ability to be as successful?\u201d Dennis asks. Another episode, in which the pals attempt to win an award for best bar, parallels the comedy\u2019s 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 \u201cSunny\u201d finally made it onto the Emmys stage\u2014as presenters. \u201cWait, hang on, have you guys been doing this every single year without us?\u201d Day asked the crowd from the stage. \u201cMaybe they got some trophies backstage that they just, like, forgot to give us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSunny\u201d frequently draws comparisons to the profane animated comedy \u201cSouth Park,\u201d which addresses Zeitgeisty tensions with a similar irreverence. The difference is that \u201cSunny\u201d does not frame the issues it\u2019s tackling as to-the-minute shocks to the status quo, as \u201cSouth Park\u201d often does. When \u201cSunny\u201d 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\u2019s depravity. In one of the new episodes, for instance, Dee becomes a ruthless marketing executive who coerces her intern into sex by asking him, \u201cDo you believe women?\u201d Another Season 18 episode ostensibly riffs on the right\u2019s cavalier handling and selective perception of the Epstein files, and subtly mocks vaccine skepticism when the gang insists that they \u201cdid their own research.\u201d<\/p>\n
To me, the closest sibling to \u201cSunny\u201d is not \u201cSouth Park\u201d but, rather, \u201cPeep Show,\u201d 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\u2014rooted in history and a waning sense of obligation\u2014is best described as \u201clead weights dragging each other down,\u201d as one of them puts it. When \u201cSunny\u201d first aired, it zagged away from dominant sitcom hits such as \u201cFriends,\u201d with weekly conundrums that neither tested their characters\u2019 friendships nor reinforced their long-standing bonds. It wouldn\u2019t suffice to characterize \u201cSunny,\u201d either, as a show about nothing except observing daily absurdities, as \u201cSeinfeld\u201d is. The gang never learns anything, in fact, save for new ways to be horribly cruel to one another\u2014taking the \u201cPeep Show\u201d frenemy ambiguity one step further\u2014with Dee a particularly frequent target: the others repeatedly dismiss her by calling her a \u201cbird\u201d 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\u2019s finally become a star on the comedy circuit. By digging into the cruelty that reflects darker shades of our society, the show exposes it.<\/p>\n
\u201cSunny\u201d shares another, more controversial kinship with \u201cPeep Show.\u201d In 2020, a spate of sitcoms on streaming platforms and in syndication, including \u201cCommunity,\u201d \u201c30 Rock,\u201d and \u201cGolden Girls,\u201d pulled episodes that showed their characters using black- and brownface; likewise, FX took down five episodes of \u201cSunny.\u201d The decision divided fans: some approved of the decision, whereas others advocated for the episodes\u2019 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 \u201cbarometer is off for what\u2019s appropriate sometimes in situations because, like, we\u2019ve spent fifteen years making a show about the worst people on the planet, and because it\u2019s satire, we lean so heavily into this idea.\u201d (The episodes remain unavailable on streaming platforms.)<\/p>\n
In a Season 15 episode, \u201cThe Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7,\u201d which originally aired in 2021, the show addresses its own regretful use of blackface by lampooning Hollywood\u2019s self-congratulatory stance during the racial reckonings of 2020. After the library removes the gang\u2019s \u201cLethal Weapon\u201d tribute films (these films-within-the-show feature in some of the earlier \u201cSunny\u201d 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: \u201cWe\u2019ve also done a lot of growing,\u201d Dee says. Mac later announces that he would be \u201cmagnanimously taking a step back\u201d from the role of Murtaugh. He stops, waiting for applause. \u201cI\u2019m doing something anti-racist, and I think I deserve praise for that, do I not?\u201d The episode ends with a behind-the-scenes documentary about the gang\u2019s making of \u201cLethal Weapon 7,\u201d called \u201cWhite Saviors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since 2020, an ongoing cultural rejection of inclusive language and actions\u2014exacerbated by a Presidential Administration that revels in liberal and left-leaning citizens\u2019 anger at its intentionally cruel treatment of immigrants, people of color, and L.G.T.B.Q.+-identifying people\u2014has seeped into our culture. The visible brutality of Trump 2.0, in a sense, has caught up to the universe that \u201cSunny\u201d 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, \u201cSunny\u201d\u00a0\u2019s eighteenth outing finds fertile terrain by toying with this pronounced sociopolitical pendulum swing\u2014but not by vindicating its characters, who, it\u2019s implied, might share similarly cold-blooded impulses. The new episodes skewer MAGA\u2019s desire to \u201cown the libs\u201d even if it\u2019s at great cost to themselves, the movement\u2019s rampant cultural apathy, and the false promises of nostalgic revisionist histories.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Golden Bachelor,\u201d 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\u2014but 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\u2019s money, the working-class siblings complain about their physical proximity to their broke friends. Dennis\u2019s disdainful outcries\u2014\u201cWe\u2019re surrounded by poverty, Dee . . . hold your breath because you can catch it, it\u2019s like a disease you can catch!\u201d\u2014poke 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\u2019s exaggerated get-rich-quick plot smacks of risky financial endeavors, such as the rise of dystopian prediction markets. And the season\u2019s most idiotic gag, with various characters dressed up for Frank\u2019s wedding in Colonel Sanders-esque Western black-ribbon bow ties, functions as an indictment of our culture\u2019s complacent incuriosity: the gang would rather look ridiculous in the ribbon ties than learn how to tie a bow tie.<\/p>\n