Hey Wisecrack, Jared again. It’s time to chug some Fight
Milk and crank your favorite Steve Winwood CD, because today we’re talking about It’s Always Sunny is great, in part, because
of what it’s not: a traditional sitcom. Unlike the satisfying and sentimental narratives
used in classic sitcoms, ‘It’s Always Sunny’ has spent much of its twelve seasons
exploring what happens when a group of narcissistic sociopaths have their insane ideas bankrolled
by a troll-shaped millionaire. Rather than following customary tropes used
by shows like Cheers, Friends, and How I Met Your Mother, It’s Always Sunny actively
subverts them, making it the perfect anti-sitcom. Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on It’s
Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s Always Sunny follows ‘the gang’,
5 individuals who each serve a particular purpose in the steadily collapsing ecosystem
that is Paddy’s Pub. There’s: Charlie: Paddy’s janitor, and
a walking combination of bleach fumes, illiteracy, cat food, romantic obsession, and surprisingly
impressive musical abilities. There's Mac: the official ‘security of Paddy’s,
and a man that balances his thinly veiled homosexuality with an aggressively dogmatic
catholic moralism. There's Dennis: Paddy’s lead bartender, and the
Patrick Bateman of South Philadelphia. Equal parts sociopath, narcissist, and sex
addict. There's Dee: failed character actress, twin sister
of Dennis, and the target of the collective rage and hatred of the rest of the gang. And Frank: if the spirit of nihilistic greed
was a four foot eleven bald man who spent his weekends having sex in a dumpster behind
a Wendy's, this is what it would look like. One of the key characteristics of It’s Always
Sunny is its lack of normal character development. Most sitcoms follow a simple formula: take
broken, shitty people, and watch them develop into loveable grown-ups. In ‘How I Met Your Mother’ we see Barney
Stinson go from a borderline sociopath to a moralistic single father who shames young
women for their attire. In ‘Friends’, we see Joey develop from
a struggling actor with the intellectual capacity of an unplugged Sega Genesis, to a successful
actor who could potentially test out of ninth grade English. And who could forget Rachel’s journey from
worst barista on the eastern seaboard to a key player in the fashion industry. Progress indeed… Unlike its predecessors,‘It’s Always Sunny’
chooses instead to focus on a group of people who believe that personal development is for
quitters. “Quitters,” in this context, also means
anyone whose personality isn’t shaped by a mix of functional alcoholism, narcissistic
personality disorder, and the occasional crack binge. Throughout twelve seasons, the gang doesn’t
develop insomuch as they play a game of chicken with all attempts at purpose and growth. The show has, for the most part, managed to
spend twelve seasons exploring the life of the gang without any positive character development. When Frank first encounters the gang, he is
a recent divorcee attempting to reconnect with his children and donate some of his massive
wealth to charity. However, within hours of this, Frank ends
up pretending to be a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic to get attention from strippers. Frank soon becomes a man without limits, spiraling
further, further, and oh so much further into the depths of depravity. During season six Dee ends up pregnant, and
lets the guys know that one of them put the baby in her. Even though it turns out this was just a ploy
for attention, Dee’s pregnancy leads the gang to re-consider their lives. Dennis shows signs of genuine care for his
sister’s child and Charlie and Mac contemplate raising a child. This all leads to a beautiful slow motion
scene of Dee holding her newborn child. But right as we think beer soaked nihilism
has been replaced by baby vomit colored sentimentality, Dee lets the gang know that none of them are
the father. The gang quickly snaps out of it. Rather than falling into the traditional trope
in which a baby magically changes people,apologies to Barney Stinson, the gang remains the same. By season seven it seemed as if the show had
run out of ways for the characters to avoid growth. But instead of showing some form of personal
or emotional growth, they instead decided to focus on Mac’s, uh, physical growth,
all because Dee said that he didn’t look like a real bodybuilder. Aside from the veritable buffet of ‘Mac
got fat’ jokes,this also satirizes the standard sitcom model in which characters somehow always
look exactly the same from season to season, even as we are meant to believe that they
are aging. Instead of remaining an ageless sitcom trope,
Mac instead eats his way to disease. The show confronts this lack of development
in the season ten episode ‘The Gang Misses the Boat’, in which the gang literally misses
out on an exclusive boat party and leads the rest of them to reflect on the ways in which
they’ve missed out in life. This leads Dennis to acknowledging the hard
fact about what they’ve become while Frank finds a silver lining to their collective
madness. This continued failure isn’t just for the
gang; in fact, it’s their friends and associates that often deal with the worst consequences
of their antics. Take Rickety Cricket. When he first enters the world of Paddy’s
Pub, he is a handsome young priest. After the gang takes advantage of his lingering
love for Dee, he ends up alone and out of the priesthood. Cricket quickly ends up homeless and takes
the fall for the gang’s misadventures with the mafia, gets hunted by Mac and Dennis,
has half his face burned off, and ultimately ends up a Paddy’s bathroom regular. Then there’s Bill Ponderosa whose affair
with Dee sets him on a downward spiral, and eventually asks his AA sponsor, Frank, to
let him drink himself to death. And to add good measure, Bill’s son ends
up becoming a goth cocaine dealer. Even a character that usually beats the gang
at their own game, the Lawyer, eventually has his right eyeball devoured by a bird. The Lawyer’s fate as a Cyclops shows once
and for all that no one can flirt with the gang for long without being irrevocably changed
for the worse. Moral messages are a common theme in sitcoms. From Cheers’ early episode about bar-based
homophobia, to Friends’ explorations of the space between being in a relationship
and cheating, the sitcom has a tendency to periodically become an afterschool special. ‘It’s Always Sunny’ explores a group
of friends with a collective moral code that is somewhere between Bernie Madoff’s financial
principles and Lil Wayne’s views towards substance abuse. And whenever morality comes up, it’s usually
as a means to their own nefarious ends. In its first season the show wasted no time
in tackling the abortion issue when Mac, while on one of his catholic crusades, meets a pro-life
activist. Mac protests Planned Parenthood with her,
mostly as a means to get laid, before she tells him that she’s pregnant. In season seven Dennis attempts to find meaning
in life after opening up about the God-shaped hole in his heart. This search for meaning ends with Dennis giving
an emotional, but bogus, eulogy at the funeral for Dee’s baby. And in the case a baby funeral makes you sad,
don’t worry, the casket was actually filled with the corpse of a dead dog that Frank found. And the child never existed. Dennis is left accepting his own moral nihilism
and lack of emotion. That is until Frank tricks him into digging
up his mother’s corpse. Throughout the series the gang explores a
number of pertinent ethical issues, consistently robbing them of any inherent goodness: rescuing
a dumpster baby, only to take it to a tanning bed , exploiting welfare by becoming crack
addicts, using a job as a children’s basketball coach to teach lessons about physical assault
and getting Mac’s Dad killed by trying to prove his innocence. The gang even uses Bill Ponderosa’s attempt
at a booze-induced suicide for their own gain when they take a life insurance policy out
on him. At no point are the gang’s moral failings
clearer than when Mac takes them all on a Christian cruise organized by a gay-friendly
congregation. Though Mac fails to realize this, even after
joining their musical theater show. The trip ends with the gang defending themselves
from the prospect of an eternity in hell. In one day on the boat, Dee breaks a woman’s
nose at the cruise talent show, Frank and Charlie get busted for sneaking a bar's worth
of booze onto the boat and then getting drunk on boat fuel, Dennis attempts to sexually
entrap an eighteen year old girl, and Mac (finally) realizes that this cruise is being
hosted by two gay men and begs God to reign down lightning on them. The gang then almost drowns to death in an
act of collective suicide while in boat jail, and later we learn that their reckoning with
God was just a post-cruise meeting with insurance adjusters. If there is one trope that we’ve learned
to expect from the comedic sitcom, it is the classic ‘will they or won’t they’ -romantic
tension drawn out over multiple seasons. For ‘Scrubs’ it’s the constant back
and forth of JD and Elliot, for ‘Friends’ we have nausea-inducing decade of Ross and
Rachel (and Chandler and Monica. And Joey and roasted poultry), and of course
in ‘How I Met Your Mother’ we have the romantic saga of Ted and Robin. And Barney and Robin. And Ted and the Mother. And Ted and Robin, again. Not to break from the subversion of standard
sitcom tropes, the gang pushes romance to the limits of dysfunction. Let's take a quick tour of the romantic exploits
of the gang: After his divorce from Dennis and Dee’s mother, Frank indulges in the
pay-for-play romance offered by prostitutes and strippers. Frank also has a recurring romance with Artemis,
who shares Frank’s proclivities towards ‘getting weird’. Mac’s romantic journey is a string of attempts
to assert his masculine heterosexual image against the gang’s overt acknowledgement
of his homosexuality. This journey in sexual identity includes a
relationship with a transitioning woman , and a non-sexual PCP fueled fling with party-girl
Dustee, until Mac finally admits to being gay in the most recent season. But rather than turning this into a cathartic
moment, Mac only comes out for the sake of a scratch-off ticket worth $10,000. Dee’s romantic exploits might be the most
pathetic of the gang. Largely a series of hook ups that end with
her being mocked by the gang, the show collects all these men together for her child’s birth,
including favorites like jean shorts guy, the mentally retarded white rapper, Bill Ponderosa,
and the old Korean man from the back of Mr. Kim’s restaurant. Dee’s one flirtation with sitcom romance
is in the episode ‘The Gang Misses the Boat’ where her and Charlie hook up. This is quickly acknowledged to be a huge
mistake. Dennis is the only member of the gang that
experiences any romantic success, if success is evaluated by the metrics of his own horrifying
system of seduction. If Dennis has a slightly less pathetic, if
a significantly more criminal, romantic life than the others, this is largely due to his
absence of emotion and inability to love. Though in the finale of season twelve it seems
like he may have finally give up his system for the life of family man, but more on that
later. Charlie is the only member of the gang that
flirts with monogamy, if we take monogamy to be a fifteen-year obsession with a waitress
who has filed multiple restraining orders against him. While a traditional sitcom would make this
obsession seem ‘sweet’, It’s Always Sunny shows the darkside of rom-com love. Charlie’s stalking of the waitress is a
full-time job, and leads him to eventually write and produce a musical that he uses to
propose to her. While his efforts to win her heart seem to
be doomed, the show actually uses the trope of two people finally getting together in
the most recent season. However, the show quickly gets back on course
when Charlie finds himself annoyed with the waitress only hours after consummating over
a decade of romantic desire. And soon after, Charlie is accusing the waitress
of stalking him: While for any other sitcom Charlie’s sexual victory would signify a
Rachel and Ross level of romantic consummation, It’s Always Sunny brutally subverts standard
sitcom logic and give a realistic take on what happens when obsessions become reality. At Paddy’s, there is no happily ever after. For the gang, any romantic achievement is
just a reminder of their fundamental lack of ability to ever be truly happy. After spending eleven seasons avoiding reliance
on any classical sitcom tropes, season twelve might have many thinking that the gang has
finally been forced to grow up, especially as we have Dennis embody Sam Malone’s closing
moments on ‘Cheers’. And at this point, the gang finally growing
up feels like your long-term drug dealer all of the sudden inviting you to the local bible
study. Luckily, the show has figured out how to critique
the outside world while letting the gang stay the same. And instead of selling out to network style
tropes, they manage to offer hilarious critiques of moralistic musicals and our recent obsession
with true crime shows. They even get a little meta when they make
a sitcom out of Mac and Charlie’s moms, all while taking a jab at canned laughter. So rest assured, your drug dealer won’t
be inviting you to church anytime soon. While there is no indication if Dennis is
actually going to move to North Dakota to raise his son, the logic of the Paddy’s
universe seems to indicate a low possibility of actual growth.
That was pretty good. My only critique would be a little less on the story line parts. If we're watching this video, we know what you're talking about. I think they play as cartoon characters since the second season. In the first they were still humans who had realizations and full ranges of feelings when you watch them again. They are like the Simpsons or any comic strip, the point isn't growth but a platform to satire real issues.
it's a sitcom