Jmunney's Blog

Season Analysis: I had heard that Season 8 of Sunny was heavy on callbacks to previous seasons, which I wouldn’t really know, because I didn’t watch the show back then.  And I’m not sure what the point of all that would have been anyway.  Anyway, I don’t know if I’d go out of my way to recommend this show at this point, but it’s definitely still enjoyable and may have even hit a series high point this year.

“The Gang Gets Analyzed”
The Always Sunny gang is obviously the gift the keeps on giving for armchair psychologists, and “The Gang Gets Analyzed” is a pinnacle of the series for acknowledging as much.  Like my pick for the best of the previous season (“Chardee MacDennis”), Season 8’s tops is also a bottle episode.  It is fun to watch people from the outside world deal with the insanity from Paddy’s Pub, but when you stick them in a room just the five of them – or in this case, one other person – that is when the crazy sparks really start to fly.  Of course the reason for a grand psychoanalysis of the gang actually happening would not be because these people actually realize they need help and the real reason would be something trivial like forcing Dee’s therapist to decide whose job it is to do the dishes.  Each session serves as a showcase for each of the principal actors (helped along by the vastly underrated Kerri Kenney Silver as the therapist) – Rob McElhenney strikes at the bizarre with Mac’s truly unique body issues, Charlie Day displays legitimate psychological growth in a perfectly Charlie fashion, Glenn Howerton shows that he is the master at playing your friendly everyday psychopath, and Kaitlin Olson proudly presents her acting (that is, lying) skills.  But it is Danny DeVito who gives the most masterful performance, as Frank goes from spitting pistachios to show his disdain for therapy to then, essentially unprompted, spilling his guts about his first love – a girl “who thought she was a spaceman with a plastic bag for a helmet.”  This episode serves as the ultimate statement on the truly wild psyches of these individuals, not because it does anything to fix their issues, but because it clarifies how doing so would be essentially impossible given the fact that how they live their lives is so far beyond any normal human interaction.