Last week we had a chance to watch an episode of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" and talk about all the great and totally hilarious and not at all problematic shock comedy in it.

Jack's Notes:

  • Straight from the title card, the showrunners are indicating that they are making an episode based on a previous episode that was a fan favorite but was garbage. The entire plot of the episode is around “recycling their trash” so recycled trash is what we get.
  • “Blasting us in the ass” exact same prison rape gag from gas crisis, Mac is gay and actually comes out in a really cool episode after this one. But he has to constantly remind everyone that he isn’t gay up to this point.
  • Again with the rape van/spy van gag. It’s unspoken but the mention of “we tried going door to door before” was the gag from the gas crisis ep. The whole point of it was that it looks like a creepy van that someone would use to abduct someone and rape them, they call it a rape van. It’s a very Gen X style South Park level shock joke that is like purposefully softening a very serious topic. It’s not cool, but I don’t think the Always Sunny showrunners have really figured that out yet?
  • Frank tries to get Dee to be a whore to bribe a politician. I mean why not? Our politicians are involved in that kind of stuff all the time.
  • Re-hashing the “group dynamic” gag, The Brains The Muscle The Looks, The Wildcard. More recycled garbage
  • Rape van gag again
  • “Guys in tuxedos haul your trash away in a windowless van” is exactly an indication of how harebrained the gang’s schemes are regularly. Also of course they are scabbing, because they are terrible people. But they aren’t actually scabbing because they aren’t actually working for the org, they are just being opportunistic AnCaps.
  • Whore politician is outdated, that’s an idea best left in the trash “wink”
  • Frank’s weird male gazey stuff also extends to his own adopted-sort of daughter. Very much trying to illustrate the whole type of creepiness similar to what we saw with Donald Trump. But they were doing this with Frank’s character (who is a libertarian capitalist) before Trump was president. They have likely seen this type of shit firsthand from being in hollywood for 30 years
  • Recycled an old character, literally recap for the audience
  • Wildcard stab discussion
  • Love it when they sing
  • Plan actually works for awhile, unlike the gas idea which was sort of in theory a better idea with worse execution? But this one is a much worse idea but with better execution?
  • Sorta homophobic jokes/injecting or assuming sexuality. Working a deal to undermine a union. Twink, twunk, twank. I think the showrunners think maybe they are trying to be hip by normalizing subsections of queer culture but the whole thing just comes off very ok boomer takes on queerness, which maybe it’s supposed to cause it’s Frank? Idk. All pretty gross discussion stuff tbh, this is prob the most cringe part of the ep imo.
  • “let's just dump it in a poor neighborhood because they don't mind living in their own filth.” this is the type of lines the gang routinely use, strawmanning a stank take for us to make fun of and root for their failure. This is the point in the ep where you know the failure is imminent so they really go hard on jerkassing their characters so you will relish it. It’s part of the show’s formula tbh
  • Union contract is back on now, presumably because the politician has a worse time dealing with these yahoos than the trouble the strike was causing. Dee does brownface and it is ubercringe, on purpose, but still ubercringe because they sort of doubled and tripled down on a very bad position regarding blackface, but then apologized and addressed it.

Blackface address episode: https://deadline.com/2021/12/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-addresses-blackface-controversy-1234884709/

  • IIRC the Lethal Weapon 7 ep was written by a black lady and was actually fairly based
  • But because like you said the whole episode was mostly an apology
  • I like the series too for that reason, watching it over the years gives me a slice of time look at what was right on the border of acceptable and not
  • And I think that the boundary has actually moved outward and back inward over the run of the show
  • Because the showrunners realized oh wait pushing this boundary for the sake of it (like south park does) actually hurts people
  • People suffer and take real observable damage as a result of this shit being on TV
  • Dee incites a “race war”
  • They work together as a team for once in the whole series and everything looks like it’s going great, then Charlie cuts the brakes again. But it was just a ruse so Charlie would throw himself out of the van, but the strike is now over so it can’t work. End show.