It's
Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Funnier on Cable
It
seems that ever since Seinfeld ended its nine-season run on
May 14, 1998, the media industry has been lamenting the demise of television
comedies. Entertainment Weekly, for instance, first reported
on the “Death of the Sitcom” in its April 16, 1999, issue,
writing that “the current generation of sitcoms has two fundamental
problems: the situation, which is mind-numbingly familiar from one show
to the next; and the comedy, which not only is a threat to national
intelligence but often carries the unfortunate burden of not being funny.”
The magazine ran a follow-up cover story on April 2, 2004, entitled
“Are Sitcoms Dead?” and yet another article on October 6,
2006, this time asking the question “Where have all the sitcoms
gone?” while suggesting that “TV comedy is broken.”
Although
NBC has recently put together a “Comedy Night Done Right”
lineup, consisting of My Name Is Earl, 30 Rock and
The Office, that rivals its “Must See TV” Thursday
night glory days, comments made by former Murphy Brown writer
Diane English in that 2004 Entertainment Weekly cover story
still resonate today: “There are (network) executives who value
mediocrity because it feels safe, middle-of-the-road. They value that
sort of broad sweep of ‘we’re not going to offend too much.’
They eliminate the highs, the lows. The risk-takers suffer and have
to fight to keep their unique voice.”
In August
2005, however, almost exactly in the middle of the “Are Sitcoms
Dead?” and “TV Comedy Is Broken” headlines, cable
channel FX premiered a new series, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia,
which, according to Wikipedia, began life as camcorder pilot filmed
for under $200. The series, which has recently been renewed for a fourth
season, follows a group of immature, self-centered, back-stabbing and
politically incorrect individuals who live up to the show’s tag-line
of “Seinfeld on acid.” The foursome operate an
unsuccessful bar called Paddy’s and get into both cringe-worthy
and hysterical situations that test society’s tolerance and ethical
mores. In short, the show is the antithesis of those valued by the network
executives described by English.
The characters
on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia reflect this difference,
as they are neither safe nor inoffensive. Mac (series creator Rob McElhenney)
is the most obnoxious and thus least popular of the group, but can never
understand why people don’t like him. Dennis (Glenn Howerton),
on the other hand, is the vain one. “It’s like flipping
through a stack of photographs,” he explains to sister Dee in
regards to why he doesn’t want to listen to her dreams. “If
I’m not in any of them and nobody’s having sex, I don’t
care.” And when Paddy’s inadvertently becomes a successful
gay bar, his acceptance is based more on being referred to as “the
cute one,” despite his heterosexuality, than any financial windfalls.
Charlie (Charlie
Day), meanwhile, has no ethics. “Charlie’s using you to
prove he’s not racist and then he asked me out on a date,”
the waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) who Charlie has a perpetual crush
on correctly tells a young African American girl. And in the episode
“Charlie Has Cancer,” Charlie fakes having the illness in
an elaborate scheme to use Dennis to convince the waitress to go out
with him. Finally, Dee (Kaitlin Olson), while being a little more grounded,
is equally superficial. When told that Charlie has cancer, her initial
reaction is to worry about him losing his hair during chemotherapy.
“That is so sad. He’s going to look so bad without that
hair.” And although she wants to visit her grandfather, whom she
hasn’t seen for awhile, in a nursing home, she asks Charlie to
go with her. “I have a little bit of a problem with old people,”
she tells Charlie as to why she can’t go alone. “It sounds
a little mean, but I find them kind of creepy. Scary. And gross, I think
they’re gross. It’s their hands mostly, you know how you
can see right through them, all their inside business.”
In the
show’s second season, veteran actor Danny DeVito joined the cast
as Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank Reynolds. As lowlife as the
other characters are in terms of their humanity, Frank is even lower.
A successful—albeit shady—businessman, Frank’s arrival
coincided with a midlife crisis which he resolved through a night of
drinking with the gang. “I used to live like this, in squalor
and filth,” he tells Charlie. “Always trying to get over
on people, scamming my way through situations. I want to live like you
again, Charlie. I want to be pathetic and desperate and ugly and helpless.
This is the change I’ve been looking for.”
A slew
of politically-incorrect topics populate the episodes of It’s
Always Sunny In Philadelphia, from racism to sexism, abortion to
welfare. But although this may sound as if the series was intentionally
trying to be outrageous, it actually comes across as a more subtle exploration
of the inherent humor in society itself. “What we are doing is
presenting both sides of the argument and poking fun and poking holes
in all of them,” creator McElhenney recently explained to EW.com
(March 6, 2008). “(We) take on the abortion issue or the gun control
issue—we hope it’s a comedic take, ultimately, but that
it (also) has some kind of social relevance.”
Ira Ungerleider,
who was both a writer and producer on Friends, also spoke to
Entertainment Weekly in 2004, offering that “you can
go wrong trying to come up with a formula or trying to calculate what
the audience wants. I understand there’s a lot of money at stake.
But there are those moments when people say, ‘You know what? I’m
going to just go with my gut on this one.’ Those moments turn
into greater things, like Seinfeld.”
Unfortunately,
it’s the cable channel executives as opposed to the network suits
who understand that philosophy these days, as the best comedies on television
seem to belong to the HBOs (Entourage, Flight of the Conchords),
Showtimes (Weeds, Californication) and FXs. In that
sense, maybe the sitcom never died after all, but simply moved to the
greener pastures of cable—and Philadelphia—instead.
March 17,
2008
