It 39;s Always Sunny Season 15 Review
Marthe Bernskoetter
The interlude with Dennis, Charlie, and Mac attempting to hawk their inflatable wares outside a local furniture store is breezy to the point of irrelevance. Even as the actual breeze sends on blow-up divan fatally into the path of an oncoming car.
I have to say I am thrilled by how much I enjoyed The Gang Inflates. That fact that these guys still have their fastball after all these years is a huge relief. I would hate to see the corpse of this once great show continue to shuffle on for years too long like The Office.
Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang was pretty weak. I just wanted to add to the conversation that Charlie having twin sisters was set up originally in season 1 Charlie Got Molested, during the intervention scene. That's a hell of a long time to wait for a payoff on that, and not a particularly worthwhile way of doing it if you ask me. Maybe they will come back again this season.
Welcome to Episodic Medium\u2019s coverage of the sixteenth (!) season of It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which debuted with two episodes tonight on FXX. As always, the first review is free, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For more information, check out our full summer schedule and our About Page.
It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is back for its record-extending 16th season. That\u2019s a hell of a streak for a show that\u2019s core premise and characters not only haven\u2019t but absolutely cannot evolve in any meaningful way. Whether or not the young Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, and Charlie Day were aware of it or not, the three young creators saddled themselves with a daunting degree of difficulty back in 2005 in crafting a show around\u2014as has become shorthand for It\u2019s Always Sunny\u2014the five worst people in the world.
A 16-year run featuring five people unwilling and/or constitutionally unable to change, grow or evolve\u2014especially one that traffics in the brashest, crudest, and most deliberately provocative of humor\u2014sounds interminable. And, in lesser hands, it no doubt would be. The true tightrope act that is It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of exquisite restraint in the face of unparalleled knockabout boorishness, an act that\u2019s only become more impressive as the five absurdly talented actors behind it seem poised to outgrow it with every year.
Glenn Howerton left the show at the end of Season 12 to star in A.P. Bio before Dennis Reynolds suddenly reappeared at Paddy\u2019s Pub with little explanation. (\u201CWell, I\u2019m back for now,\u201D Dennis tells the surprised Gang after unexpectedly showing up at the close of the Season 13 premiere.) Howerton is also currently receiving some of the best reviews of his career for BlackBerry. Charlie Day has pursued a movie career with some success, and is currently promoting his directorial debut, Fool\u2019s Paradise. Kaitlin Olson branched out, starring in her own Fox sitcom while still playing Sweet Dee. (Oh, The Mick, we hardly knew ye.) Rob McElhenney\u2019s been perhaps busiest of all, creating and starring in Mythic Quest and buying and running a professional Welsh football team with pal Ryan Reynolds, complete with an attendant reality TV series, Welcome to Wrexham. (Old pro Danny DeVito just does his thing.)
The understandable message from all this outside-of-Philly activity is that, as successfully as It\u2019s Always Sunny mines its insular little world for bottomlessly inventive and adventurous dark comedy, the people behind it need more, creatively. Even within the show, each character has undergone the sort of major personal traumas that would have signaled their cathartic exit from the Gang\u2019s codependent squalor if not for the fact that Dennis, Dee, Charlie, Mac, and Frank\u2019s collective and individual neuroses, obsessions, and willful blind spots keep them yoked inexorably together.
Dennis\u2019 Season 12 explosion upon temporarily exiting the fetid clubhouse that is Paddy\u2019s echoed Howerton\u2019s strangled actor\u2019s frustration. Charlie\u2019s deeply disillusioning pilgrimage to meet his birth father in Ireland last season ended with the Gang\u2019s designated whipping boy and rat-murderer delivering the sort of heartbroken (and heartbreaking) cry to the heavens that, on any other series, would lead to profound growth. Mac ultimately coming to grips both with his homosexuality and the fact that his terrifyingly judgmental convict father Luther would never, ever love him seemed destined to shake It\u2019s Always Sunny to its foundations. Even DeVito\u2019s grunting, old school-hedonistic Frank, in the eye-opening POV Season 11 episode \u201CBeing Frank,\u201D was shown to be a borderline dementia patient, his desperate attempts to hide his encroaching senility from the Gang concluded in a bout of childlike delight as heart-wrenching as it was illuminating. Only Kaitlin Olson\u2019s Dee has yet to have her own format-breaking episode, which may be part of the joke that the guys overlook Dee as a matter of course, but is still a matter for discussion.
All of this is to say that \u201CThe Gang Inflates,\u201D the Season 16 premiere of It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is an ordinary day in the life of the Gang. And that\u2019s not a bad thing. In the year and a half of our time since the end of Season 15, nothing has changed, and I mean nothing. The guys are seen hanging out at Paddy\u2019s, shooting the shit and giving the first rumblings of the roiling conflicts that will set the story in motion. Dee is absent, in the sense that she\u2019s glued her hand to her apartment door in protest of her in-progress eviction by her unknown, money-grubbing landlord, with the running joke of the guys hanging up on Dee\u2019s increasingly frantic calls for help in turn reintroducing Sweet Dee\u2019s true spot in the Gang\u2019s brutal pecking order. That Frank launches into a surprisingly cogent rundown of economic policy in response to Mac and Dennis\u2019 complaints about rising prices signals how Frank\u2019s lifelong mastery of predatory greed is one of the last things to leave him. Charlie drops in a reference to the 1990\u2019s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for color, and we\u2019re off.
\u201CThe Gang Inflates\u201D indeed sets out in several disparate directions, which isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing. The Gang routinely fractures along ever-shifting fault lines, the week\u2019s overriding conflicts sparking rapidly kindled and reckless enthusiasms. (The Gang routinely employs the self-aware phrase \u201Cgetting hot\u201D to refer to their collective penchant for hair-trigger obsession.) Here, Dennis and Mac pick up on their half-understood (at best) talk of \u201Cinflation,\u201D as Mac greets Dennis at their apartment with a collection of inflatable furniture purchased to replace the elderly sofa they\u2019d apparently been renting to the tune of $20,000 over the course of it\u2019s 15-year lifespan. Even for Mac, it\u2019s a little obtuse (\u201COk, went real literal with it,\u201D muses Dennis), especially since he further picked up on Frank\u2019s reference to his and Dennis\u2019 financial \u201Cnut\u201D by purchasing an alarmingly huge and low-priced can of fancy mixed nuts that he shovels into his gob throughout the episode.
So that\u2019s story one, as Dennis hatches a scheme to lure investor Frank into an inflation-beating inflatable sofa scheme. In story two, Frank, after looking for a place to store his latest trash-picked treasure in his and Charlie\u2019s squalid, tiny apartment, uncovers the fact that the overstuffed \u201Cstorage room\u201D is actually the apartment\u2019s never-used bathroom, complete with a working toilet. (Famously, Charlie and Frank whiz in cans and drop their solids in a communal bathroom down the hall.) As far as groundbreaking series developments go, this is potentially big, answering the question of how, even in the show\u2019s hellhole Philadelphia, a landlord could get away with renting Charlie a toilet-less apartment for 15 years. Couple that with the fact that the never-opened door behind Charlie\u2019s hot plate is revealed to contain a spacious (if equally filthy) empty bedroom, and it\u2019s the sort of grubby world-building a season premiere can work with.
And so it\u2019s a significantly expanded base for Mac, Dennis, and the harried Dee to gather. (Dee, still sporting a hacked off segment of door glued to her hand, tells Charlie airily, \u201CIt\u2019s a piece of door, move past it\u201D on her way in.) If this all sounds a bit ramshackle, that\u2019s because it is. As noted, It\u2019s Always Sunny routinely sends its five numbskulls off in wildly different directions, split into teams based on that week\u2019s source of \u201Cheat.\u201D The most deftly plotted episodes ultimately weave those threads together in unexpectedly satisfying patterns, but, here, it\u2019s enough to watch five very funny performers put their well-understood characters through their paces.
Dee gets the least to do. (Again, it\u2019s left to be seen whether the show will ever turn the joke of Dee\u2019s irrelevance to the rest of the Gang into Kaitlin Olson\u2019s own tour de force episode.) Gluing her hand to three separate surfaces throughout the episode is a slyly funny way to continue the theme of Dee\u2019s half-understood enthusiasm to at least ape the action of people who care about anything but themselves. (The implication being that Dee\u2019s heard that young activists glue themselves to stuff and therefore glues herself to stuff in order to get her own way.) There\u2019s a great reveal later when Dee is shown to have adhered herself to Dennis and Mac\u2019s apartment wall, for reasons only she could possibly explain.
Frank and Charlie\u2019s conflict is the most fraught and potentially fruitful, as Frank\u2019s desire to have more room to stretch out in their shared squalor strikes at Charlie\u2019s terror of abandonment. (And the twisted father/not-quite-son interdependence they\u2019ve built.) Charlie Day can work up a head of manic steam better than anyone on TV, and Charlie\u2019s misplaced rage over Frank\u2019s embrace of their new room sees him ranting about the distance it now takes to answer the door, complaining about \u201Cblowing out our shoes\u201D and needing a butler to traverse the extra ten or so feet.
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