A few weeks ago the FX staple It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia finished airing its 16th season. Even though most seasons are 8-10 episodes, compared to broadcast sitcom runs in the 20-24 range, this still means they have nearly 200 episodes and have left an unshakeable impact on television of the last two decades. With COVID delays and shake-ups to the schedule, I had fallen a bit behind, but I got caught up on seasons 15 and 16 and now I’m here to review them.
It’s kind of strange to talk about these seasons because, though they had plenty of highlights and not a lot of duds, I can’t help but think that it’s time to put the show out to pasture. I think the biggest reason for this is the kind of political satire that the show does, and how it works in today’s world.
The first episode of season 15—”2020: A Year in Review”—is a good example of this. It’s three segments in one as the gang reflects on their PPP loans over the past year. Dennis and Mac made a country song to help with the vote and unintentionally caused the vote counting delays in the 2020 election. Frank started a sketchy hair dye business that was the reason for Rudy Giuliani’s bad dye job. Charlie and Dee made a sewing enterprise that supplied fur to the January 6th protestors. The episode is tied together by the joke that they were concerned that “their guy” wouldn’t get a fair shake in the election. And, of course, their guy is Kanye, not Trump.
It’s a decent joke, albeit one that has aged very poorly, but it also underscores the political problem facing the show. In the past, in episodes about welfare or gun control, Always Sunny managed to illuminate some cause for critique on both sides of the issue, but root things in the gang’s selfishness and conniving behavior. The welfare episode, from back well over a decade ago, highlights that while, yes, there are problems in the welfare system, the bigger problem is selfish assholes who want to abuse the system (I should note that I think they’d do that episode a bit differently now, but that’s a topic for another day).
Ideologically speaking, the gang of the show is more conservative than they want to admit. Frank is defined by his gun, and only lack of drive or opportunity keeps Dennis and Dee from going full QAnon or MLM Instagram mom. Mac with his complex feelings on religion would also find a home with the Christian nationalism behind much of the current right-wing rhetoric. As the stint in Ireland drives home, Mac is desperate for someone to tell him who he is—gay? Irish?—and right-wing authoritarian movements would be happy to do so.
But, at the same time, for reasons of the fanbase and suspected political leanings of the creators, the gang can’t actually be the right-leaning group they often are in all but name. And this made the political moments of season 15 not land as well.
I do want to give the show credit for addressing vaccines—Charlie being the only one who definitely took it—and putting COVID into the narrative. The lack of sitcoms these days has meant a lack of shows that even attempt to address COVID, and it’s left a big void in TV which has, until recently, been a good reflection of major events as they happen. In the Ireland arc, they do this pretty well, weaving COVID—and Dennis’s denial of it—into the story effectively.
But, like I said, the show has run its course. It’s a show about likable assholes, and those people don’t really exist these days. In “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7,” there is an attempt at addressing cancel culture narratives, but it’s far less successful than the TimesUp episode a few seasons prior. It’s not clear what the target is for the satire or what they hope to say.
But these are all season 15 examples, and season 16 did feel a little more sure-footed.
We start with “The Gang Inflates” which feels like the classic Sunny format. Everyone is out to make a buck and screw over whoever they want, and everyone has no idea how inflation works. It’s a little frustrating to see such a basic take on the topic, but the commentary works a lot better than it did in season 15. The following “Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang” works similarly, lightly touching on gun control by mostly side-stepping it. It effectively conveys how people like Frank have a fetishistic attachment to their guns and so are more willing to be shot on a beach than give up the gun and the power it represents. I do wish the Mac and Charlie B-plot tied in a bit more, but it mostly works on its own.
These are two pretty good episodes that feel like they came out in 2010. “The Gang Gets Cursed” also feels like a remnant of another time. That’s not exactly a bad thing, though semi-recent seasons have found success addressing things like TimesUp and Mac’s sexuality.
When I say the show has run its course, I mean that it doesn’t have anything new to add to the world of TV. When it tries to get meta or topical—in the early part of season 15—it largely missteps. The 5 best episodes of season 16, and there are only 8 episodes so that’s the majority, feels like they came out 10 or 12 years ago.
There are two stand-out episodes of season 16: “Frank vs Russia” and “The Gang Goes Bowling.” The former riffs on the real-life absurdity of a chess grandmaster using anal beads to beat Magnus Carlson. Here Charlie and Frank use the same tactic to win a fairly minor tournament, their inability to play chess and Frank’s exaggerated reactions adding to the fun. The B-plot is also great as Dennis uses the SINNED (DENNIS backward) system to help Dee and Mac get boyfriends. It’s a good mix of callback and group dynamics, as the trio of Dennis, Dee, and Mac usually produces the best stuff.
“The Gang Goes Bowling” might be even better, bringing back the waitress, Artemis and the McPoyles in a plot that revolves around the gang bowling. The absurd instability of Dennis and Dee is on full display leading to a simmering cauldron of petty tension like many of the best episodes of yore.
Season 16 is a solid bounce back from a couple of mixed seasons in 14 and 15, and that’s great! But the magic is still kind of gone. The highlights of this season, and there are quite a few, are the moments that feel like how the show was 10 years ago. This is because the eternal return of the group and their inability to change is a key joke of the show. That joke still works and still produces some great moments, but with the state of the world as it is, it strikes me as indulgent to ignore the forces bigger than you to this degree. Too indulgent even for this show.
It was a show for a pre-2016 world, when societal tensions around race and gender didn’t seem quite so hot and when you could get away with a little bit of “both sides” -ism for the sake of comedy. But that world is long gone. I believe the show is renewed for two more seasons. I hope they’re seasons full of episodes as we got in season 16 that feel unstuck from the 2020s. I hope we get a few more well-placed callbacks, and an off-ramp for Charlie to escape their destructive behavior (as was a big theme of season 15), and then they wrap up. 18 seasons is a mighty long time, and in that time, the world and television have outgrown this show.
But it was nice to get a few flashes this season of the old Sunny. Give me 10 more episodes of that and call it a day.
