It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Has Nothing Left to Prove

In “The Guys Have a Sleepover,” the finale of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s 18th season, something remarkable happens, and it’s not when Frank falls face first into a cookie on which he ejaculated and tried to get his daughter Dee to eat. It’s slightly later in the episode, when the proudly juvenile Charlie encourages the always-neurotic Dennis to admit that he’s afraid of sleepovers, and wary of the pranks, hijinks, and goofy bonding activities they usually include, because he’s really afraid of being pushed out of his comfort zone. Choosing truth in truth or dare, for example, is scarier when you’re staring down 50, a sentiment with which Charlie agrees — but “when you have friends, the world’s a lot less scary place,” Charlie says, before the two hug it out. Then Charlie follows through on his original dare for Dennis by throwing them off the roof they’re standing on and into a dumpster below.

It’s a classic It’s Always Sunny swerve, where the characters’ readiness to do awful things is interrupted, albeit briefly, by a moment of sincerity. But it’s also a rare instance of self-reflection for these characters and the kind of beat that could only come out of being TV’s longest-running live-action comedy. They really are getting older, like Dennis acknowledges, and they really have been doing this for 20 years, like Charlie says. For these two characters who aren’t often paired (it’s usually Charlie and Mac or Charlie and Frank, and Dennis and Dee or Dennis and Frank) to have such a touching bonding moment is It’s Always Sunny finding newness in established familiarity. And even though the episode gets expectedly nasty again by having Charlie and Dennis draw dicks on everyone’s faces while they’re asleep, their heart-to-heart is nevertheless a notable illustration of where It’s Always Sunny is creatively and where it could still go if it comes back for more seasons.

As It’s Always Sunny creeps steadily toward 200 episodes, the series is relying on its past story lines and internal lore more than ever before. Over the years, the Gang have lied about their own skills, personalities, and preferences; destroyed property; offended everyone they possibly could for every reason they possibly could; and even killed and gotten away with it. They can be monstrous, and that’s what makes them so fun — even if Dennis, Charlie, Dee, Mac, and Frank had our sympathy or empathy, they’d mock us for offering it. Their unbothered forward momentum and ability to keep finding new rock bottoms of awfulness are key to the series’ nihilistic comedic appeal but also its longevity: Characterizations can still be tweaked; disagreements can still come out of nowhere; life-changing decisions can still be made and unmade. It’s Always Sunny has turned itself into a self-sustaining ecosystem in which every new season is tipped a little bit more toward reminding viewers of past glory instead of introducing fresher bits. No matter — to try too hard would not be It’s Always Sunny’s style.

That shrugging lack of seriousness about itself is also why this could be the right time to end It’s Always Sunny. It seemed like that might be the case when this 18th season was revealed to be ten episodes, a conspicuous bump from the eight-episode orders of the preceding three seasons. And after watching the first eight episodes of this season, I thought: Well, maybe it’s time. Because It’s Always Sunny, for all its astonishing flexibility over the years, has also reached a point of diminishing returns, and this season’s best gags were mostly backward-looking. Premiere “Frank Marries a Corpse” reset the status quo by killing off rubber-chicken-fortune heiress Sam (Carol Kane), whom Frank proposed to at the end of last season in a crossover with The Golden Bachelor; Sam’s head falling off her corpse thanks to flesh-eating bacteria is a particularly grisly gesture that we’re done with the sentiment of Frank finding his soulmate. “2026: A Virtual Insanity” uses the beats of a zombie movie to return the Gang to their longtime habit of being suspicious of unhoused people and brings back disgraced-priest-turned addict Rickety Cricket to once again lose his temper when the Gang denies any involvement in his misfortune. “The Gang Gets Tested” is rife with callbacks, from Dennis and Dee getting addicted to drugs again (as they did in season two’s “Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare”) to Dennis having sex with an older professor for a better grade (the positioning of Dennis’s body, with his sweaty head and pained orgasm face entering the frame, is a long-running visual gag). In “The Gang Goes to Ren Faire,” the Gang tricks their milk-swigging rivals the McPoyles so brothers Ryan and Liam joust each other, leading to Liam, who lost his eye thanks to the Gang in season eight’s “The Maureen Ponderosa Wedding Massacre,” stabbing out Ryan’s eye.

Elsewhere in the season, there are mentions of the Gang’s past schemes involving Tesla Cybertrucks and water parks, and another instance of Mac’s felon father vowing to kill him, and a scene where Mac references his coming out via a modern-dance number. (That was an imagined sequence the Gang did not know about; their lack of awareness is referenced, too.) But all this wry meta-ness can’t obscure the season’s dearth of original ideas, and the many cameos from beloved characters like Rickety Cricket and Artemis underline how few truly memorable new ensemble members have been added in recent seasons. It’s so hard to say good-bye to yesterday, as the Gang well knows, and the hints of nostalgia wafting through those first eight episodes gave the impression we might be watching a victory lap. It’s Always Sunny has yet to confirm whether or not it will return for another season, but to end here would be to leave on a triumphant note, one where It’s Always Sunny outlived all its early aughts peers, never sacrificed its voice, and went out on its own terms — pretty much everything the Gang has always wanted.

Then a funny thing happened. Those extra two episodes that I thought might signal It’s Always Sunny was preparing to wrap it up actually turned me around toward wanting more — ironically, by offering more of the same. In “Frank’s Team: A Dark Day for Baseball,” the Gang realizes Dee has a great throwing arm, enlists her to beat a little-league team full of boys, and then ignores her clear injuries because they want to fulfill their fantasies of being a team owner (Frank), a commentator (Dennis), and coaches (Charlie and Mac). The episode ending with Dennis calling Dee “a bitch and a bird” is expected, but an ICE raid on the Spanish-speaking players Frank has brought in, and the Gang being shocked by the violence but disinterested in helping the children ostensibly in their care, is the sort of unexpected political satire only this show could pull off. And that genuine Charlie-and-Dennis moment in the finale, which was written by Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton, works so well because it gestures at a commonality between the series’ creators and its OG fans; time goes only one way, and maybe it made more sense for the Gang to be doing all these absurd, stupid things when they were younger — but if they can keep doing them now, why not? This show has created characters so deeply realized that they can hang in Abbott Elementary, point out the artifice of The Golden Bachelor, re-create Making a Murderer, and spoof Succession. It has slathered Danny DeVito in an array of commercially available goops, cemented Kaitlin Olson as a generational pratfall queen, and established its own unique approach to political satire that can skewer everything from gun culture and the undemocratic nature of American democracy to the occupation of Palestine and the brutality of ICE raids.

More so than a victory lap, this 18th season feels like an argument that It’s Always Sunny could continue on indefinitely. Even if it has become a bobblehead of nods to its past, it remains impressive how the series’ writers keep coming up with new ways to remix these elements and that the actors can keep finding new shades of within these characters. As always, Howerton is the cast MVP, with his elastic, expressive face selling all of probable-serial killer Dennis’s most hyperbolic reactions. It’s his quiet moments in “The Guys Have a Sleepover” that are so powerful, though — the tentative way he says to Charlie, “That was awesome, dude … maybe we should call it,” about their night together, and then his pleasantly surprised expression when he says to Charlie the morning after the sleepover, “I had a blast. I really did.” Both lines can be construed metatextually, like Dennis is admitting the Gang has come to the end of the road. I hope not, though. Howerton and Day have been successful outside It’s Always Sunny, of course — as have Rob Mac and Olson — but where else on TV would they get the opportunity to dig so deeply into such untethered-from-reality characters? It’s Always Sunny never seemed to say “no” to anything its actors or writers wanted to do, and if they want to keep the party going, who dares tell them otherwise?