It 39;s Always Sunny Season 16
Rachelle Kun
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is an American sitcom created by Rob McElhenney and developed with Glenn Howerton for FX. It premiered on August 4, 2005, and was moved to FXX beginning with the ninth season in 2013. It stars Charlie Day, Howerton, McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, and Danny DeVito. The series follows the exploits of "The Gang", a group of narcissistic and sociopathic friends who run the Irish dive bar Paddy's Pub in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but spend most of their free time drinking, scheming, arguing among themselves, and plotting elaborate cons against others, and at times each other, for personal benefit, financial gain, revenge, or simply due to boredom or inebriation.
With its fifteenth season, the series became the longest running live-action American sitcom, and the longest running series ever on cable TV surpassing The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which ran for 14 seasons (435 episodes) between 1952 and 1966.[6][7] In December 2020, the series was renewed for a total of four additional seasons, bringing it to 18 seasons.[8] The sixteenth season premiered on June 7, 2023.[9] The show has received critical acclaim, with many lauding the cast performances and dark humor. It has amassed a large cult following.[10]
The series follows a group of misfit, narcissistic sociopaths, referred to as "The Gang", who run a meager, unsuccessful Irish bar called Paddy's Pub in the neighborhood of South Philadelphia. The Gang originally consisted of janitor Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day), bouncer Mac (Rob McElhenney), and bartender Dennis Reynolds (Glenn Howerton), the three of whom own Paddy's Pub, in addition to Dennis' twin sister Dee Reynolds (Kaitlin Olson), a struggling actress who works as a waitress there. In the second season, they are joined by Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito), an eccentric millionaire and the neglectful father of the Reynolds twins, who takes over most of the ownership of the bar. He soon becomes the financial catalyst for the Gang, often funding many of the Gang's over-complicated plots, while simultaneously succumbing to the brazen depravity of the group.
Each member of The Gang exhibits unethical behavior and anti-social traits such as extreme selfishness, pathological dishonesty, narcissism, physical and emotional aggression, excessive drinking and substance abuse, unregulated emotions, cruelty, greed, misogyny, manipulative tendencies, predatory behavior, jealousy, sociopathy, apathy toward suffering, emotional detachment, frequent abuse of the legal system, exploitation, discrimination against disability, race, and appearance, rudeness and contempt to others, and absolutely no regard for the people around them, while also displaying acute codependency, stupidity, negligence, and a surprising lack of awareness of basic social norms. The comedy of the show emerges from these extreme character traits resulting in conflicts that lead The Gang into absurd, dark, and painfully embarrassing situations, typically ending with them getting their comeuppance, but never learning their lesson. This allows the show to mine a variety of socio-political and economic issues for satire and dark humor while keeping the characters in a state of relative stasis conducive to the long-running sitcom format.
Episodes usually find The Gang hatching elaborate schemes and regularly conspiring, against both outsiders and one another, for personal gain, revenge, or simply schadenfreude. They habitually inflict physical and psychological pain on anyone who crosses their path, even each other, yet always return to the status quo at Paddy's Pub because they have alienated the rest of society and have only each other's company in the end. The Gang has no sense of shame when attempting to get what they want and often engages in activities that others would find humiliating, disgusting, or shocking. Some of these situations include pretending to be disabled, becoming addicted to crack cocaine in order to qualify for welfare, attempted cannibalism, kidnapping, waterboarding, blackface, blackmail, stalking, grave robbing, hiding naked inside a couch to eavesdrop on people, tricking a man into giving his daughter a lap dance, foraging naked in the sewers for rings and coins, impersonating police officers to extort civilians, creating a cult, secretly feeding someone their dead pet, plugging their open wounds with trash, setting an apartment full of people on fire and nailing the exit shut, taking out life insurance on a suicidal person, and lying about having AIDS in order to get priority access to water park rides. In an angry summation of their circumstances during one such escapade, Dennis laments The Gang's dynamic:
With rare exceptions, Paddy's Pub generates limited revenue. Most stay away from the establishment due to the numerous stabbings that have taken place. The few regular customers have been known to serve themselves. The Gang has been known to close Paddy's for extended periods without warning. When the bar is open, they shirk their respective jobs' responsibilities and choose to drink instead. Paddy's is only able to stay in business because of Frank's financial backing, government bailouts and tax fraud.
The show features a core cast of five characters (The Gang) and a recurring cast of colorful side characters, including the Waitress, Cricket, the McPoyles, the Ponderosas, the Lawyer and various family members like Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Mac and Uncle Jack Kelly, who cross paths and interact with the Gang in increasingly unhinged ways as the show progresses.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia grew out of an idea for a short film conceived late one night by McElhenney "where a friend came over to another friend's house to get sugar, and the friend tells him he has cancer, and all the guy can think about is getting his sugar and getting out of there".[16] He wrote the scene down before taking it to Howerton the next day to flesh it out and work on making it comedic. Day was soon roped in and the first script was written, featuring three struggling actors in LA named Charlie, Glenn and Mac, and the ensuing awkwardness around Charlie's cancer diagnosis. The home movies were shot and reshot multiple times, initially with Hornsby playing the Mac character and McElhenney behind the camera as director. It was via this process that McElhenney, Day and Howerton learned the basics of shooting, editing and other aspects of film-making.[17] The three then developed a second "episode" of their home movie series, this time focused on the humor from Mac's sense of shame around his relationship with Carmen, a transgender woman.[15] At this point, it became clear that the home movies had potential as a television series, instead of the short films they were envisioned as originally. Both parts would eventually end up in the episode "Charlie Has Cancer".
The home movie was titled It's Always Sunny on TV after the a-ha song "The Sun Always Shines on T.V.". Howerton had been listening to the album Hunting High and Low (1985) while stretching at a Crunch gym in West Hollywood.[18] This was then developed into a pilot called It's Always Sunny on TV and was shot on a digital camcorder[19] and filmed in the actors' own apartments.[20] They expanded the central cast to four people living in Los Angeles, "a group of best friends who care so little for each other", Howerton said.[16]
It was believed the pilot was shot with a budget of just $200, but Day would later comment, "We shot it for nothing... I don't know where this $200 came from... We were a bunch of kids with cameras running around shooting each other and [the] next thing you know, we're eleven years in and we're still doing the show."[21] This pilot was shopped by the actors around various studios, their pitch being simply showing the DVD of the pilot to executives.[19] After viewing the pilot, FX Network ordered the first season. The show was budgeted at $450,000 an episode, less than a third of a network standard, using Panasonic's DVX100 MiniDV prosumer video camera.[19] The original concept had "the gang" being out-of-work actors with the theme song being a cha-cha version of "Hooray for Hollywood";[22] however there were too many shows at the time with a similar premise.[16] "The network came to us and said, 'We don't want a show about actors,' and we said, 'Fine, let's put it somewhere else,'" McElhenney explained. "I'm from Philly, let's put it in Philly, and we'll make it about a bar, because that's a job where you can have lots of free time and still have income that could explain how these people can sustain themselves."[16] The title was later changed to reflect that, in the unaired pilot, the gang had been rewritten as bar owners in Philadelphia, instead of actors in LA. Prior to Kaitlin Olson joining the show, the character Sweet Dee was going to be played by Jordan Reid, who at the time was the girlfriend of McElhenney. The part was recast after they broke up.[23]
The show is shot in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The exterior of Paddy's Pub is located at the Starkman Building on 544 Mateo Street in Los Angeles. On April 1, 2016, the series was renewed for a thirteenth and fourteenth season, which matched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet with the most seasons for a live-action sitcom in American television history.[26] In January 2023, McElhenney confirmed that filming for the sixteenth season had begun.[27] In May 2024, DeVito said that the seventeenth season would begin filming in September 2024.[28]
The third season ran from September 13 to November 15, 2007. On March 5, 2008, FX renewed It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia for a fourth season.[34] On July 15, 2008, it was reported that FX had ordered 39 additional episodes of the series, produced as seasons five through seven of the show. All five main cast members were secured for the entire scheduled run.[35] The fifth season ran from September 17 to December 10, 2009.[36] On May 31, 2010, Comedy Central began airing reruns.[37] WGN America also began broadcasting the show as part of its fall 2011 schedule.[38]
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