It's Always Sunny: The Sitcom in its Purest Form

    Spoilers for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, of course. Mild spoilers for Friends and The Office.

    When people talk about It’s Always Sunny, the first things they typically mention are how its characters are terrible people, how it uses dark and offensive humor, or how it’s an “anti-sitcom.” Those are all the show’s main selling points. But what I find most appealing about It’s Always Sunny, that lodges its place in my mind, is that it distills the sitcom format into its purest form.

    The easiest way to demonstrate what I mean by that is to point you to Sunny’s episode-naming convention. Look at the titles of these episodes: Dennis Gets Divorced. Mac and Charlie Write a Movie. Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare. The Gang Buys a Boat. The Gang Texts.

    A character performs an action. This is the basic formula behind all sitcoms. Only, most shows have a little more pretense than that. They have series-long arcs and dramatic moments and people get married and have kids.

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    The only other sitcom I know of that you can really apply this naming convention to is Seinfeld. Try to fit it into an episode of The Office or Community and it just doesn’t work. 

    You could certainly call an Office episode Michael Falls Into a Koi Pond or The Office Goes to the Beach, but unlike with Sunny, this format doesn’t capture the essence of the episode. “Koi Pond” isn’t just about Michael falling into a koi pond and seeing what happens. It’s about Michael’s sensitivity to people’s opinions of him, and how he and Jim interact as co-managers. “Beach Games” has a lot of fun putting the characters into a beach setting, with Michael doing a Survivor bit and Dwight naming his team Gryffindor. But it also forms a major point in Pam’s arc toward becoming more self-confident. Even Michael’s Survivor competition leads into the season finale, as Michael believes he has to choose his successor after a job opens up in corporate.

    Another sitcom, like Friends, might seem like a purer sitcom than The Office. Friends often involves grounded, low-stakes moments that try to emulate the feeling of hanging out with a group of friends. You could give some subplots or episodes a Sunny-style name – “Joey and Chandler Watch a Baby”, “Ross Moves a Couch”, “Ross Gets a Tan” – but even here you have ongoing character arcs and the episodes’ other, more serious subplots.

    Even Friends’ destination episodes, at the beach or in London or Barbados, center around major turning points in the character’s relationships. They aspire to something more than just having the characters in a new situation, as with so many episodes of Sunny.

    Stripped of those frills, a sitcom becomes like a mathematical function. Just as you can plug any number into a function and get a result specific to that function, you can put any scenario into a show and get a result specific to that show. The variable might be “going to the beach” or “going bowling”.  When we plug that x into the function f(x), we get something completely different, thanks to that show’s specific characters and style. 

    We already know what it’s like to go to the beach or to go bowling. But we want to see the Sunny characters go to the beach, and then we get those specifics. Charlie likes creepy-crawlies and getting high on weird stuff, so it makes sense that at the beach he looks for “sea specimens” and drinks sunscreen. There’s something delightful about seeing those familiar character traits manifest themselves in new ways.

Source: Pinterest.com, from an article titled “What Happens If You Drink Sunscreen?” Pinterest had this tagged with “Population of the Philippines” and “Pale People”.

    If you put that same variable into a different function, you get a much different result. In Friends’ beach episode, we get to see Joey digging a hole on the beach and Monica getting stung by a jellyfish. In The Office’s, we see Creed catch a fish with his bare hands and Andy float away in an inflatable sumo suit. We love to see that this is how this set of characters would react to this situation.

    And no show gives its characters as many weird idiosyncrasies as Sunny. Tiny quirks like Frank’s toe knife, Mac’s obsession with Chase Utley, or Mac’s mom not doing much of anything, come up again and again in so many different variations.

    This focus on the characters’ idiosyncrasies is why I struggle to see Sunny as an “anti-sitcom.” While it subverts some sitcom tropes, it maintains that core appeal of having a cast of characters we like to see again and again.

    The characters being bad people doesn’t prevent us from liking them. We enjoy seeing their debauchery from the safety of our television screens. Rather, the fact that the show is upfront about their immorality lets us like them more. You never get that feeling you get from some shows, where the character does something terrible and the show still wants you to root for them. Sunny doesn’t have to worry about its characters doing something illegal, nonsensical, or repulsive, because we expect them to do those things. This means Sunny has more freedom to let its characters drive the story. It can stick closer to that sitcom essence.

    Instead of being an anti-sitcom, Sunny better fits how I’d define a comfort show. It uses the familiar sitcom format with a low-budget feel. I don’t have to pay attention to an overarching plot or theme. It takes place in a city I know well, with some location shooting in that place. It puts fun characters in fun settings and situations. I can turn my brain off when I watch it.

    Many episodes of Sunny obviously have social and political messages. But the message rarely lies far below the surface, and only involves as much complexity as the topic needs. Everything still comes through its zany characters, and you don’t need to think too much about it.

    To take a closer look at how I see Sunny, I want to analyze my personal favorite episode: The Gang goes to the Jersey Shore. This is Sunny’s take on the beach episode. It’s like no other show’s beach episode. It’s simultaneously, undeniably Sunny, but also so widely relatable.

Source: IMDb.com

    The premise of the episode is that Dennis and Dee remember the fun they had at the shore as kids, and want to do a shore trip with the gang. The others are skeptical, but they go anyway.

    The Reynolds siblings try to show the others the wonders of the shore. They stay at the same motel they stayed at as kids, they go to the same beach, and they walk the same boardwalk. 

    The shore doesn’t live up to the lofty image that Dennis and Dee remember, though. They find out that the motel used to house a meth lab, and the beach is covered in trash and stray dogs.

Source: TVmaze.com

    Dennis and Dee, blinded by nostalgia, remain insistent in their love for the shore. When they explain how they have to hide their booze in sunscreen bottles to circumvent the town’s open-container laws, they see it not as an inconvenience but simply as a fun quirk of the shore.

    Dennis also fondly reminisces about having his first kiss under the boardwalk. He takes Charlie there, expecting Charlie to love it, because Charlie loves gross, underground places. But when they go under the boardwalk, they find two homeless people having sex. It scars Dennis’s once-romantic memory of the place.

    This seems an opportune time to mention that they filmed this episode in the real Ocean City, New Jersey. I love how these earlier episodes of Sunny use location shooting. It adds to the show’s low-budget feel, like someone just picked up a camcorder or a phone and filmed these people. It also makes the show feel more real. I love how I can say I’ve walked some of the same places as Charlie and Mac. As much as I try to suspend my disbelief for The Office, the streets and the foliage in outdoor shots sometimes just don’t feel like Pennsylvania. The Sunny gang’s outrageousness stands out even more when it happens against these very real backdrops.

    Apparently, some Ocean City residents weren’t too happy about the show filming in their family-oriented resort town: https://patch.com/new-jersey/oceancity/was-its-always-sunny-too-adult-for-the-family-resort. I imagine that the shoregoers who tuned in to see their beloved town on TV weren’t exactly within Sunny’s target audience. Personally, this episode just makes me want to go to Ocean City more.

Source: WhatCulture.com

    Over the course of the first part of the episode, the gang abandons Dennis and Dee. Frank and Mac end up on a raft floating in the ocean, while Charlie explores the beach. Dennis and Dee go on a boardwalk ride, but Dee’s braided hair gets stuck in it. The two wind up at the hospital. There, they reason that, instead of trying to relive their childhood, they should experience the shore as adults. They meet a woman who lives at the shore, and agree to hang out with her.

    Frank and Mac lose sight of land and fear that one of them may have to eat the other, until they get picked up by some Italians’ party boat. Because this episode came out in 2011, and they had to do a Jersey Shore reference somewhere. Frank and Mac have a great time on the boat, getting spray-tanned and eating Frank’s rum-infused ham. Charlie, meanwhile, encounters his long-time crush, the waitress. Though she usually can’t stand him, she’s happy to hang out with him here at the shore. The two of them spend the night playing on the beach and looking for sea specimens. Dennis and Dee, however, get caught up in a robbery gone wrong. They end up being forced at gunpoint to bury a body on the beach, only narrowly escaping. 

    The characters who loved the shore as kids end up having a terrible time, while Frank, Mac, and Charlie love it. Here the episode imparts its lesson: that we can find happiness in new things, rather than trying to bring back a past that never was.

    The montage of Dennis and Dee burying the corpse, Frank and Mac partying on the boat, and Charlie frolicking with the waitress is set to the Go-go’s “Vacation”. In the scenes with Dennis and Dee, it’s ironic. Having this catchy, upbeat music against the stressful, morbid scene is hilarious. But in the other scenes, the song is sincere. We want Charlie to be happy collecting seashells with the waitress. We like seeing Mac and Frank have fun, forgetting how they turned on each other earlier.

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    The episode ends with the gang all regrouping at the motel, as people on a vacation do. Frank, Mac, and Charlie all gush about the great day they had, but Dennis and Dee, still on the run, rant about how the Jersey Shore is a terrible place and they need to leave as soon as possible. It’s a classic sitcom reversal: the ones excited about the shore in the beginning of the episode now want to leave, and the skeptical ones now have fond memories of it.

    At the core of all these shenanigans, this episode perfectly understands the relationship people have with vacations. People who have a favorite vacation spot have a love for that place that seems irrational to those on the outside. Years of going to that place and having a good time imbue every little aspect of that place, and every tradition associated with it, with a certain specialness. Getting to know a place over years of vacations makes it feel like home. Only, this home feels a little more special because we only visit every so often.

    We rave about familiar sights, like a tacky gift shop that sells trashy knick-knacks, or a pizza place we always eat at. To the people who don’t have nostalgia for those things, they just seem lame.

    Everyone with a typical vacation place experiences this to some extent, but it especially holds true for beach trips, where people often return to the same house every year. It holds even more true for all those Pennsylvanians who flock to the Jersey Shore each summer. That’s what makes this my favorite episode of It’s Always Sunny. It says something true, something recognizable on a universal level while also hyper-specific to the experience of living in eastern Pennsylvania. It’s maybe the best example of this show using its terrible, self-centered characters to say something good.

    This last part might contradict my earlier point about how Sunny lacks the frills like character arcs and moral messages that other sitcoms have. But I think it still stands when you remember that Sunny conveys this truth just by putting its characters at the shore and seeing how that plays out. Any well-made story says something, whether intentional or not. This episode works even better because Sunny ties its story to a relevant real-world truth, but the basis of the story still comes about from the simple fun of wanting to put the characters in this situation.

    You could also say that this episode forms part of Charlie’s overall arc. Him leaving Philly and meeting up with the waitress in this episode leads to him finding his father in Ireland and getting over the waitress later in the series. But these points don’t feel planned out in advance like character arcs in The Office and Parks and Recreation do. The show started with the basic character traits “Charlie has a crush on this random waitress”, and “Charlie is afraid to leave Philly”, and what comes after builds off and riffs on those traits.

Source: YouTube.com

    What does this all tell us about TV writing? That so much comes back to the characters, and a simple plot sometimes works. That it’s okay to have fun, and just say, “I want to write an episode set at the shore” or “I want to see Mac and Frank stranded in the ocean, contemplating who gets to eat the other”. If you stay true to the characters and the situation, you’ll end up with something good.

    Have a great summer, everyone.

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