The title of the Season 13 premiere of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” tells you plenty about where the creators’ and stars’ heads have been these last couple of years.
“The Gang Make Paddy’s Great Again,” airing Wednesday on FXX, finds (most of) the group plotting a take down of a rival bar by pitting liberals and conservatives against each other using “fake news.” In another episode, the men — Mac (Rob McElhenney, the creator), Charlie (Charlie Day, an executive producer), Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Frank (Danny DeVito) — exert buffoonish power plays over one another during an Escape the Room challenge, while Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is squarely ignored.
“The last couple seasons we had to take such a huge break between when we finished making the episodes and when they aired, that it was hard to write anything topical,” Day said. “This season we were able to be a little bit more current.”
"Always Sunny” has never been much of an awards darling — though it does have three Emmy nominations for stunt coordination — but it maintains a fiercely loyal fan base. A lot has changed since 2005 when the darkly comic series debuted, but while the narcissistic, amoral characters have remained mostly the same, the performers behind them have evolved alongside the culture.
In phone interviews with Day and McElhenney, and, separately, Olson, they discussed the show’s progression, tackling current events and the concept of redemption for the gang. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.
Q: One big cultural shift has been the emergence of the #MeToo movement. Did you talk about how that might inform Dennis’ well-documented predatory tendencies this season?
McELHENNEY: Yeah, absolutely. In fact we have an entire episode where the gang goes to sexual harassment training because we felt like it was obviously something that we needed to address. I think everybody that watches the show recognizes that it’s satire. Obviously, we would have to address Dennis’ misogyny in the season. I think we did it in a pretty satisfying way.
DAY: Something I’m proud of that we’ve always done is, we’ve always pointed it out. The joke is that the characters are pointing it out. The comedy’s coming out of the fact that this character is such a maniacal egomaniac that he doesn’t hear his own voice. We’re able to keep doing what we’re doing because the worse these people behave, the more the point of the storytelling comes across. If it’s missed, it’s missed. You can’t hold everyone’s hand.
Q: There’s a scene in the second episode this season in which Dee is trapped in Dennis’ bedroom, and it’s really unsettling.
OLSON: I wasn’t in the writers’ room. I do live with the creator (McElhenney, her husband), so we talk about that stuff a lot.
I think at the end of the day, we’re trying to make people laugh, not change anyone’s mind. Everyone’s just upset right now, and we’re just trying to address that there are these issues. To us, it’s really funny to push the characters as far as we can, without turning them into cartoons. Dennis is a creep, and he is inappropriate with women, and we just embraced it and went with it. Q: There’s a way in which Dee could come off as the embodiment of the “cool girl” trope in “Gone Girl” — the woman who prides herself on being able to hang with the boys while exhibiting internalized misogyny. I don’t see Dee in that light, though. Kaitlin, how do you view your character in relation to the rest of the gang?
OLSON: We’ve been doing this for 13 years now, and for the first four years, every time I got interviewed, 90 percent of the people interviewing me asked how I was able to “hang with the guys,” comedically. And it was so incredibly insulting. But it was also refreshing how shocking that was to hear because I never considered that I was a woman “hanging with guys.” It feels, to me, on set, that we are five people who are having a really fun time and making each other laugh.
If we’re these despicable creatures that are all really selfish, it’s equal opportunity name-calling. I like that they don’t treat me like a lady. Nobody’s opening a door for Dee.
Q: The gang has become more introspective in some ways, especially when it comes to topics like race, sexuality and gender. There are aspects of the Season 1 episode in which Mac punches a trans woman that haven’t aged as well; is there anything you look back on that you would approach differently today?
McELHENNEY: Yes. I think that’s a great example right there. We as a show and as creators, and we as a culture, have come a long way in the last 13 or 14 years. It’s important to us that we are progressing with the culture and recognizing that things that we may have thought at the time may have been acceptable or OK weren’t really, but we weren’t aware of that.
DAY: That being said, I have to call out your example for a minute there, because Mac doesn’t go and punch a trans woman in that episode because she’s a trans woman. We set up in that episode that he has a reflex when someone comes onto him from behind. He just turns and punches. He does it to his friend who’s a woman earlier in the episode, and then it’s called back later in the episode when he does it to that character.
McELHENNEY: I don’t know that the issue would be that I punched her. I think the issue would be the way that we handled even just using the term “tranny.”
DAY: Sure.
McELHENNEY: Using the term “tranny” casually, as if it’s just the way that you would refer to a transgender person, is. The character today might still be doing that, but we as a show would recognize that’s a derogatory term.
DAY: Correct. However, as a result of that moment, two blue-collar construction guys see him do that and say, “Hey, isn’t that a hate crime?”
Thirteen years ago I would say we were way ahead of the game of being progressively delicate around these issues while still not being afraid to use them. There might be certain moments that maybe don’t age as well, but we’ve never been a show that is not coming at these characters through that lens.
McELHENNEY: We’ve never been a mean-spirited show. The characters have been mean-spirited, but we as the creators have never been. At least it’s not our goal.
OLSON: Yeah, that word is not OK anymore, which I don’t think we knew back then. But now, I’m not sure that a character on our show wouldn’t say it. (But) somebody else would comment on it — like, “Whoa, you can’t say that!” On the actors’ and writers’ side, there would be growth there. But we wouldn’t want growth for the characters.
DAY: They’ve always tried to debate the right thing or wrong thing to do. Look, in another 20 years probably, there will be lots of things we’re doing now that people are like, “Oh, that doesn’t age that well.”
McELHENNEY: We’ll address that in an episode 20 years from now, in our mid-60s. Q: The characters have become more self-aware, but do you believe there’s any chance they could be redeemed? Last season, in the fantastical body-switching episode “The Gang Turns Black,” the twist was that they learned nothing from that experience of living as black people for a day.
DAY: It would’ve been a phony ending if these characters had learned a sweet, happy lesson at the end of it. That being said, this season we have a great episode with Frank and Mac that deals with Mac’s sexuality and Frank’s discomfort around him now that he’s out of the closet, where he does learn something by the end. It’s really nice.
The answer is: sometimes; sometimes no. It’s the creative process. It’s whatever we think tells the best story but also says the best thing about us as people.
OLSON: I have to think of Dee as someone who’s just so deeply insecure that that’s what motivated all of her behavior. She’s just desperately trying to get all of the gang, specifically her brother (Dennis), to like her and respect her. I don’t think that these characters are despicable. I think Charlie’s really lovable. If anything, I would say the Dennis character is a legitimately awful person., but Mac coming out as gay (in “Hero or Hate Crime?”) was a very legitimately tender moment, on purpose.
That came out of Rob getting a lot of feedback on social media from the LGBTQ community, who were so excited at the end of one of our earlier episodes where he admits that he’s gay, but then goes back in the closet. A show that they loved was going to have a character coming out of the closet — and then he took it back, and they were legitimately upset.
He paid attention to that. It was just funny to us that he was fighting against it. But, then it was like, OK, we’ve done that, it was funny, there’s no reason for him to not just be gay and fully embrace it.
Q: What is Mac’s journey this season now that he’s fully out of the closet?
McELHENNEY: It hasn’t changed too much. One of the things we wanted to make sure was, just because Mac’s out of the closet, that doesn’t mean he’s redeemed in any way. In fact, that would do a disservice, I think, to the community if all of a sudden Mac turned Pollyanna or suddenly sweet. I got a great response through social media and fans in the street, from the LBGTQ community. We felt like he should be the same character he’s always been except now he’s openly trying to date men.
DAY: The same with the characters’ reaction to him. If all of a sudden they said, “Well, hey, let’s be nice and sweet to Mac because he’s out of the closet,” it would not be true to the show and would not be true to humanity. These characters treat him the same that they’ve always treated him.
McELHENNEY: Mostly they hate Mac not because he’s gay, just because he’s annoying.
