Extreme Dysfunction at its Core

     It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a prime example of what a perfect black comedy is. It’s extremely easy to point out many episodes that leave you on hard-punching dark moments: Frank and Charlie dragging a dead hooker out of their apartment to be found in the hallway (Frank’s Pretty Woman), Mac serving Dennis his dog for dinner (Mac and Dennis Move to the Suburbs), Dee tricking a man into giving his daughter a lap dance (PTSDee), the Gang attempting to relive their childhood experiences causing a severe number of child casualties (Risk E. Rats Pizza & Amusement Center), but it's their long-running, underlying plot of extreme character dysfunction that truly makes the show unique. This theme at the core of the show grants us the ability to see the Gang not just as terrible people to laugh at, but as deeply tragic characters stuck in their own cycles of abuse. 

    Even amongst each other, they're completely self-serving: their motivations are more-often-than-not born from their own selfish interests, they don’t care to exhibit kindness to anyone in their lives in an attempt to reach their goals, and they’ll fuck over anyone they need to in order to act on every terrible whim they conceive, often resulting in the Gang destroying the lives of anyone who crosses their path (and being hated by (almost) everyone they encounter). Yet despite insane motivation, they rarely accomplish the menial goals they set out to achieve—the comedy lying in the fact that their actions are not only terrible, but an incredibly stupid, destructive way to attempt to meet their means.

    Sunny is a black comedy because their characters continually fuck people over in the most reckless, idiotic ways possible and they manage to make their own circumstances worse in every attempt to get ahead, but digging into the lives of the Gang reveals something much more tragically dark than the terrible schemes we laugh at on the surface—because it’s not just that they don’t care about what they’re doing (as that’s sometimes, provenly not the case at all), but that they’re such broken people they’re almost completely unable to recognize that their behavior is extremely dysfunctional.

The multi-faceted aspects of their dysfunction is buried in the core of almost every episode, for each character in many different ways, and as you come to learn more about the Gang, it becomes increasingly clearer as to why they continue to stay together, trapped in their own miserable cycles of abuse—because it’s all they’ve ever known and all they’re willing to understand (consciously or subconsciously, as each case greatly varies, yet almost always linked to past trauma). 

Couch Math

The Gang Inflates quickly became one of my all-time favorite episodes from the moment it aired. It’s not only a great example of what Sunny’s humor is, but a hard nod to the audience that, while a lot has changed over the years and the characters are clearly growing, they’re still committed to keeping the Gang stuck in their ways. Things are “blown up” to try and spur the Gang to move forward, yet they all end up in the same place they began, proving they can’t (or won’t) move forward:

Mac and Dennis blow up a couch to replace their old one, inspiring Dennis to pitch a new business idea he has complete confidence in (despite the fact that he had just high-fived Mac over trading a ten dollar bill for a five). Mac easily proves he can’t even make good decisions for himself while Dennis proves that not only does he have terrible business sense in the market (inflatable furniture), he also has bad business sense with investments (Charlie’s TMNT pies). Charlie washes out their debt, but they’re in their mid-40s now and provenly no closer to being able to fend for themselves.

Dee’s life is blown up when she is forcibly evicted from her apartment. Displaced, she has to glue herself to the walls of the Gang’s apartments to keep from being pushed out. Frank is the only one who has given her security and it's only because he literally owns the ground she walks on. Charlie gets her back into her apartment, but she’s been with these guys for two decades and she still has to stick herself into every situation to keep from being ignored.

Charlie’s doors are blown down as Frank refuses to hear out his investment opportunity, intent on making changes in an uncomfortable way. Charlie just wants Frank to take him seriously, hear him out on his investment, but the man won’t do that, so he has to go the long route instead. His clear sense of business-talk convinces Dennis to invest, and while it immediately turns out to be seen as another ‘worthless’ Charlie investment, it actually proves that Charlie does understand business tactic (more-so, the manipulation side of things). He didn’t set out on his endeavor to trade the pies off to Frank, he wanted to go in on them together, but he uses what he’s learned in order to keep ahold of what they know—to maintain the status-quo and put everything back to how it’s always been. 

In my opinion, it’s the perfect season opener: we’re not going anywhere, and while the Gang are going to keep trying to move forward, they’re not going anywhere either. But with that being said, one thing did go somewhere this episode: my title subject—Mac and Dennis’ couch.

For as far as we know, that thing is gone for good (and, the inflatable furniture may be here to stay). And while they’re very proud of the fact that they’ve had it for so long (albeit, rented, not owned), they’re ready to move on, and have already chucked it by the time we enter the opening scene of the season. (What spurred this? I’d say it’s pretty fun to let your imagination run wild and free on that question.) What immediately struck me as interesting is the claim of longevity of their couch: fifteen years. 

You could go the simple route of chalking it up as a nod to the audience: we’re entering the sixteenth season, so they have fifteen seasons behind them, and thus “fifteen years,” with the couch, but since Season 15 made the conscious decision to keep the show in the present-day, one season = one year no longer works for the characters. So how do we figure that Mac and Dennis, as characters living in 2023, claim they’ve had their couch for fifteen years?

They’ve been roommates for well over fifteen years, but have they had their couch for longer than fifteen years? Well yes, but also no. 

Their signature black leather couch doesn’t actually make an appearance until Season 2 (Season 1 featured a three-seater, brown couch), so we can assume they got it in 2006. Now that would still put Mac and Dennis’ couch over fifteen years in 2023, until you factor in the period of time in which they definitely didn’t have their couch—Seasons 10-12. 

Thanksgiving 2013, Mac and Dennis' apartment burns down (and thus, their couch burns too) and move in with Dee for a couple of years. In the beginning of 2017, Mac restores their apartment to its exact-likeness, black leather couch included (side note: finding out they rent that thing actually makes Mac look a little less insane for being able to perfectly replace their furniture after the fire).

So they had their couch from 2006 through 2013, about eight years, and then once again from 2017 through 2023, about seven years, to bring us to:

Fifteen years, calculated by combining two periods of time broken up by major displacement, Dennis leaving and returning, a world pandemic, but it’s now that they’re moving on. This episode everyone was displaced, yet they all returned right where they began, but the couch seemingly didn’t. 

Was it simply thrown out for a plot device? Fifteen years stated only as a nod to the show’s milestone? Or is letting go of the couch telling of something further defining? Fifteen years, reached only by constantly returning and scraping together botched time, finally put behind them? Is this, being the one lasting change from the episode, a hint that Mac and Dennis are finally ready to let go of something familiar and accept something new?

Since we never physically return to their apartment in Season 16, that remains to be seen. 

Hey-oo

What the hell is all this? Well, while it's somewhat of an obvious recreation of the original Paddy’s Pub Blog (once owned and operated by FX in order to promote the show, now discontinued), this blog is going to be fan-owned and run, and is intended to be a place for canon-rooted fan-based content, discussion, and analysis, while also doubling as a convenient location for people to find source content from the show.  

Since this show has been around for almost two decades now, it’s easy for a lot of stuff to get swept by the wayside, deleted, or just eventually become unheard of. Similarly, I get a lot of questions about things that should be common knowledge/easy to find (i.e. “Where do you get scripts?” “How can I watch old promos/DVD extras?”). While I don’t mind answering these questions, I think it would be nice for there to be a place where people can find the answers themselves instead of trying to seek out information from a fan who seems ‘knowledgable.’ So this site from the get-go has sidebar links (you might have to be on Desktop, sorry) with a lot of sources you can defer to, and will continue to add sources and links to older (and newer) footage, scripts, content, etc. as it becomes available and serviceable. 

Similarly, this place will serve as an easy source for updates on new seasons of Sunny (see Season 17 Updates tab). For now, we don’t have much information, but we don’t have nothing! So that’s exciting. That page will hopefully become more active in the next coming months, and surely will be active as we move into the end of the year. The blog will eventually double for S17 updates, speculation, etc. and, eventually, S17 recaps and analysis…woah.. what a time that will be. 

And with that being said, I should mention that the foremost reason for me starting this thing is because I want a place where I can easily post and refer to my analysis, meta, and writing about the canon of this show. While Fandom spaces are all good fun, again, it’s easy for posts and writing to get lost in a sea of years and years of shitposting and fan-spam (NTM Tumblr’s search system has gone to shit, and Twitter devolves every day now, the time horizon on both my social media sites shortens every month). 

I think there’s also something to be said for the serious-ness or validity of some of the things I (and many others) write about for this show. Yes, it is a comedy, but there are an incredible number of heavy, dark, and deep themes that run through the veins of almost every episode, and the space to post about those things sometimes (most of the time) isn’t the same place where everyone’s spamming jokes and ship content. 

Have I ever let wrong time, wrong place stop me? No. Will I? Probably not. But I would love for there to be a space where I can have these things aside, where people can be directed to writing and analysis about Sunny without waving through a social media sign up page, and where they can come back months or years later to easily find ‘that thing they read about that one episode,’ instead of being directed to a deleted blog or suspended Twitter account. 

There’s also fun stuff around the blog! You can check out the. “Random Episode” tab (wonder what that could be about), and the “Fun Stuff” tab, which contains my episode sorter and some scripts, and I’ll eventually update with additional things. I’ll also be fixing up the “Episode Guide” tab with, surprisingly, episode guides that people can refer to if they want a watch list, or just need references for types of episodes, episodes that feature certain characters or people, or certain team-ups/relationships.

If you’ve read all this, that’s cool of you, and might mean you have something to say. If you think you wanna contribute and join my little blog team, let me know, I'd love to put a little Gang together. DM me wherever you know me or head over to the Information and Contact page also on this blog and use that. The goal here is to have a full site with as much information and canon posting as possible, so the more people who are interested in helping out, the better!

Catch you very soon, when I start dumping heavy meta right in this very space. 

Peace and Love - Seth

</3 Rip angel. We will honour you.