The Improbable Longevity of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

Executives loved the show’s winking humor, but worried about its familiar setting. In the early two-thousands, HBO’s roster featured three shows that addressed Hollywood’s casual cruelties: “The Comeback,” “Entourage,” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” NBC had invested in the “Friends” spinoff “Joey,” which followed its titular character, an actor, as he moved to L.A. So the “Sunny” team ditched that idea and changed the show’s setting to Philadelphia, where Mac had grown up. Their characters were written as night-life-industry colleagues, not actors. (The show’s revamped name, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” is a pseudo joke: the sun-drenched series is shot predominantly in L.A., save for the odd episode and B-roll in its eponymous city.) The first season was filmed on a scrappy budget of four hundred and fifty thousand dollars per episode, a fraction of what it cost to make a network sitcom at the time.

The series received a lukewarm reception from critics and earned middling ratings upon its release, in August, 2005. In the Philadelphia Daily News, Ellen Gray panned “Sunny” as a show that “simply isn’t funny enough often enough to justify its rather labored envelope-pushing.” The New York Daily News was less generous, concluding that “just because you can put something on TV doesn’t mean you should.” Despite the low ratings, Landgraf liked the show—and that it cost next to nothing to make. Ahead of the comedy’s second season, FX brought on Danny DeVito to play Dennis and Dee’s impish, absentee businessman father, Frank, in hopes that his presence would bring in more viewers. (Landgraf and DeVito were two co-founders of Jersey Films, a TV-production company they started in 1999.) The inclusion of Frank, portrayed by DeVito with a rollicking sleaze, gave the writers more latitude to probe intergenerational disputes, corrosive familial dynamics, and debauchery: he has a penchant for having sex in dumpsters, he cuts his nails with an unwashed “toe knife,” and admits, at one point, to having defecated in the bed that he shares with his roommate, Charlie.

Viewership rates ticked up after FX released the show on DVD and beefed up its marketing toward college students; the show also found a niche audience on Hulu, which launched to the public in early 2008. On the cusp of the Obama era, the kind of sitcoms that were being made moved from canned network fare to cheery mockumentaries and programs stuffed with laugh-a-minute zingers. “Sunny” ’s anti-sitcom bona fides were beloved among fans who appreciated its subversive streak. But the program still continues to float somewhat under the radar, never having found massive mainstream popularity via ratings or awards—an exclusion that has not gone unnoticed by the show. An early episode features a jab that Mac directs at Dennis and Charlie which reads as a veiled comment about Hollywood’s inability to grasp “Sunny” itself: “Our problem is that we don’t stick to that basic format, and that gets us into trouble,” Mac says. “So what you’re saying is that by breaking from that format, we’re actually limiting our ability to be as successful?” Dennis asks. Another episode, in which the pals attempt to win an award for best bar, parallels the comedy’s perpetual shutout from the Emmy Awards. (It has received only three nominations, all for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a comedy program; it has won none.) Two years ago, the actors of “Sunny” finally made it onto the Emmys stage—as presenters. “Wait, hang on, have you guys been doing this every single year without us?” Day asked the crowd from the stage. “Maybe they got some trophies backstage that they just, like, forgot to give us.”

“Sunny” frequently draws comparisons to the profane animated comedy “South Park,” which addresses Zeitgeisty tensions with a similar irreverence. The difference is that “Sunny” does not frame the issues it’s tackling as to-the-minute shocks to the status quo, as “South Park” often does. When “Sunny” introduces culture-war topics, like #MeToo, and political issues, such as gun control, it mines humor from how these topical conversations further elucidate the gang’s depravity. In one of the new episodes, for instance, Dee becomes a ruthless marketing executive who coerces her intern into sex by asking him, “Do you believe women?” Another Season 18 episode ostensibly riffs on the right’s cavalier handling and selective perception of the Epstein files, and subtly mocks vaccine skepticism when the gang insists that they “did their own research.”