Jmunney's Blog

Season Analysis: When you get used to the insanity of Always Sunny, it becomes increasingly difficult to note what is unique about any particular season’s stretch of insanity.  And I’m saying this as someone who hasn’t watched all nine seasons, but only the last three.

“Flowers for Charlie”
The lack of hard science in the novel Flowers for Algernon makes it ripe for being picked apart.  That story of a man with a low IQ becoming super-intelligent, only to revert to his original state, does not need a detailed explanation, because that is not really the point, but a version of that story that focuses a great deal on the science would be problematic if it did not have an adequate explanation.  In It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s version, the scientist (Burn Gorman, who was one half of the best part of Pacific Rim – the other half, of course, being Charlie Day) and his assistant running the experiment to increase Charlie’s intelligence are given plenty to do, so it is only natural that their methods should be explained.  And it is perfectly Sunny to have that explanation be a ruse in which Charlie was merely led to believe that his intelligence was increased.  His fake Chinese and chess skills were wonderful displays of how confidence and thoroughly realized bullshit can be just as enthralling as actual talent.

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.

Season Analysis: This was the first season of Sunny that I watched, and I heard from some sources that it was not its best season, but I think that with a show as outrageous as this one, there are bound to be a few clunkers amidst the classics.

“Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games”

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia feels like it is more or less made up on the spot, by insane people.  I could possibly be off a bit in this assessment, as I have only recently become a regular viewer, and there could be foundational elements from earlier seasons that would make it clear that there is in fact some planning involved in this show.  But that improvised feel does work to the benefit of an episode like “Chardee MacDennis.”  On a slow day, the gang has nothing going on, so they decide to play a game, a game that they have not played in a while, a game that they invented.  So what we have here is something that was more or less made up on the spot, by a group of insane people.  Just because Chardee MacDennis is more or less unbridled insanity in game form does not mean it is not satisfying; Charlie, Dee, Mac, and Dennis were not just insane when they created this game, they were also insanely focused.  Thanks to that focus, this episode provides memorable gags such as Frank having to eat a cake (i.e., the ingredients of a cake), Mac drunkenly attempting to lift up a board that has been nailed down despite acknowledging ahead of time how fruitless such an effort would be, and Charlie failing to answer a question that he himself had written (“Dennis is asshole.  Why Charlie hate?”), and there is even a satisfying resolution to wrap up all the chaos, which, appropriately enough, was thought up by Frank while he was imprisoned in a dog crate.