Is the Gang Still Worse Than Us?
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns tonight with two episodes, and the number attached to them is faintly absurd: eighteen. Ten in total, weekly through October 12, on FXX, FX and Hulu. The show started in 2005. No live-action sitcom in American television history has run longer, and none of the ones that got close were still making new episodes about the same five people.
The interesting question is not whether the premiere is good. Nobody has seen it, this writer included. The question is whether a comedy whose entire engine is five people being worse than anyone watching can still run that engine after twenty-one years, or whether the Gang has quietly aged into the comfortable, self-satisfied people the early seasons existed to humiliate.
Take the case against seriously, because it is real. In 2005 the Gang were broke and irrelevant, and that is what made their cruelty funny instead of sour: they were swinging at a world that had already beaten them. Two decades of an audience that quotes them changes the arithmetic. A joke that lands because everyone in the room already adores the person telling it is a different joke. Long-running comedies drift toward fondness, and fondness is where this one dies.
The verdict, in advance
Still funny, and the ten-episode order is the reason for optimism rather than a footnote. It is the biggest run in four seasons, which is a show behaving like it has more it wants to do than it has room for. That is the opposite of the problem a twenty-first year usually brings. The short recent orders read like rationing. Ten reads like appetite.
The premiere also has one specific job, and the double-episode format makes it easy to grade. Sunny's unit is a single escalating half hour: one bad idea, compounded, detonating on schedule. Two of those back to back will show immediately whether the writers are still building toward something or coasting on the pleasure of the Gang merely being present. If both halves finish somewhere the first two minutes could not have predicted, the show is fine. If the second one runs on you being happy to see everybody again, that is the drift, and you will feel it tonight rather than in October.
Where to jump back in
If you bailed somewhere in the middle, do not restart from season one and do not try to be a completist about the last decade. Start at season twelve. It is the last stretch where the show still felt capable of making you genuinely uncomfortable rather than just making you laugh, and it is where the distance between how the Gang see themselves and what they actually are is at its widest, which is the gap this show has always mined best. Watch that, skip straight to the most recent season, then tonight. Two blocks, no homework, and you arrive at the premiere with current expectations instead of 2005 ones.
Put it on tonight and see whether it still bites.
