(left to right) Charlie Day, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney

It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is the longest running live-action television sitcom ever, at least in terms of the number of seasons. It’s most recent (15th) season finished airing in December of 2021 and, despite a change of scenery, kept up the typical hijinks of the owners of Paddy’s Pub, or “the gang”. “The gang” consists of five sociopaths, who stick together because they likely couldn’t find anybody else: Mac (played by the show’s creator, Rob McElhenney) is a far-right Catholic so long as it is convenient; Charlie (Charlie Day) is an idiot with a big heart; Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a sexual predator and psychopath with a dangerous self importance; Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is maniacal failed actress; and Frank (Danny DeVito) is former business mogul who prefers to live in squalor.

From the character descriptions alone, it is easy to see how the show might be considered ‘offensive.’ If you didn’t already get the picture, in the pilot episode, which is called “The Gang Gets Racist,” Charlie drops the N-word in just the first couple of minutes. The show is filled with moments like this, where the characters cross the line into absurdly terrible behavior. Many listicles highlight the worst of the worst. How on earth can a show like this still be running, and even be renewed through its 18th season already? There are a couple reasons. Mainly, the show is an obvious satire on those behaviors. The audience is not laughing with the characters, instead the audience is laughing at them (most of the time). This is the same satiric principle used in the film Blazing Saddles but instead of the bad guys being openly and horribly flawed, it’s the protagonists. Another reason is that the show actually isn’t escaping a politically correct landscape unscathed. Five episodes throughout the seasons have been entirely removed from streaming. Each one contains at least one scene with blackface, brownface, or something akin and their omission on streaming platforms is understandable. For your education, here is a scene where Dee performs her brown faced stereotype of a Puerto Rican girl, Martina Martinez.

While the characters do not develop nearly as much as one might expect over a period of 15 seasons, they constantly engage in new and interesting situations. The show doesn’t seem to stale as much as other sitcoms would have by this point because of its short season length. With only about ten episodes, the cast and writers can play with current events and shifts in culture each season to keep things fresh. In an interview with the Rolling Stone, Rob McElhenney described the show as “just looking at the current cultural climate through the prism of these terrible, terrible people.” This is especially evident in the latest season, where in one episode the characters recognize their history of being politically incorrect. The episode “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6” is one of the banned episodes, but in the episode titled “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7” the gang tries to make a sequel that would be able to satisfy a PC audience because their previous movie got “pulled from the local library.” In the end of the episode they realize that they cannot make their movie entirely inoffensive without it being terrible which is an obvious metaphor for the show itself.

It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is the longest running live-action sitcom for good reason. It’s almost always funny and from the very first episode the tone is set for the audience — and it only gets more absurd from there. If you haven’t seen the show yet, make time to do so!