Abbott Elementary Bound to Bring Shine to Sunny

As we’re all well-aware by now, the Sunny Gang will be appearing in an episode of Abbott Elementary during their current fourth season (an episode likely to air in January), and for a few weeks since the official announcement of this event, a lot of people have been asking: is this going to be a reciprocal crossover? Well, we now have an answer straight from Kaitlin Olson, courtesy of Variety: Yes. 

Not only will Sunny have an episode that works in tandem with the crossover, but the cast of Abbott Elementary will equally be featured in said episode. Kaitlin expressed how excited she was to see the teachers of Abbott get nasty in a few weeks, something they can’t do on the family-friendly ABC channel. (Though I wonder, will they? Or will most of the teachers attempt to keep their cool even when faced with some of the worst people on the planet?) 

And while it truly remains to be seen as to whether or not the characters of Abbott will bring some shine to Sunny in the form of spirit, we can very easily reason that the characters simply appearing on Sunny is guaranteed to bring shine: in the form of attention. 

As a statistics guy, the moment this crossover was officially announced I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers floating around in my head (it’s one of the few things that made this crossover idea seem almost infeasible to me). Because while Sunny is well known by the general public for it’s insane out-of-context clips and memes (and its longevity legacy status), its actual audience is pretty cult-like: Sunny's live audience hits nowhere close to the numbers that any show you’ve never heard of on Network television reaches. (In fact, in 2015, when Sunny was in its tenth season and hit its all-time high record for viewership, it ranked only #524 in viewership for Primetime Series on Television, just below Food Network’s, Beat Bobby Flay and just above Diners, Drive ins & Dives.)

Knowing and enjoying Abbott Elementary enough to have followed the viewership and demos of the show for the past few years its been on air, I knew one thing for certain: Abbott’s audience is monumentally larger than Sunny’s, well more than double and maybe even tenfold. Looking at the raw stats from the most recent seasons of each show makes that pretty clear: 

Ratings and Viewership for Season 16 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Ratings and Viewership for Season 3 of Abbott Elementary

Excluding episode 6 (as Abbott’s episode 6 aired following the Oscars and should clearly be considered an outlier), Sunny’s average viewership for 7 episodes during the 2023-24 TV season comes in at 259,000, while Abbott’s is 2,508,000. In short, there are about 2.25 million more people tuning into new episodes of Abbott than there are people tuning into new episodes of Sunny:

This all being laid out in order to reckon with the fact the crossover on the Abbott side will be exposing Sunny[’s characters] to actually, truly, almost ten times (9.85x if you wanna get real specific about it) as many people as Sunny does, on average (on broadcast, that is). 

To me, this was a bit of a daunting number when we only knew (for certain) that the Gang would be appearing on Abbott… now that we know the Abbott teachers will appear on Sunny, these numbers are almost frightening...

Assuming a large portion of Abbott’s audience tunes in weekly because they enjoy the characters as much as (if not more than) the show in general, the audience will likely want to follow the teachers to witness them in another (harsher) environment (just like how Sunny fans are excited to follow the Gang into a different (softer) environment). In fact, it seems pretty likely that pulling Abbott's audience into Sunny may be just the intention, as Variety claims the crossover episode of Abbott Elementary will air before the episode of Sunny.

Having the show with the larger audience lead in to the show with the smaller audience is not an unfamiliar practice of television; in fact, Network channels love a lead in. (Traditionally lead-ins are more commonly used to introduce a new show after a fan-favorite to bolster viewership ratings, but the practice of a lead in with crossovers is still familiar, as recent as the CW’s Arrowverse.) And, coincidentally (or not..) enough, Abbott Elementary and Always Sunny just so happen to air on the same day of the week as each other, in back-to-back timeslots, respectively (a fact I actually used in my initial speculation that the crossover for Abbott would be with Sunny). 

Of course, people would have to switch the channel (and also own cable), but the lead in would still have quite an effect on Sunny’s viewership, as there’s likely a huge chunk of Abbott’s audience excited to see their favorite characters in not only a different tone, but a different style of show (seeing the Abbott characters on Sunny will be the first time they’re ever viewed completely “off camera”), regardless of whether they like (or even know) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

(Additionally, not factored into any of the numbers herein, both shows stream on Hulu in the States and Disney+ internationally, so for the many millions of people who watch Abbott on a streaming service (ABC's latest press release boasted 6.19 million viewers for Abbott's Season 4 premiere), the boost of the crossover episode will likely have an even larger effect on pulling an audience to Sunny (in fact, they’re already pushing Sunny on users who look up Abbott on Hulu).)

And the thing is, even if just a quarter of Abbott’s audience cares enough about the characters to tune into Sunny’s episode featuring them, those views would still result in triple the audience Sunny has pulled, on average, in the past four seasons. (And to restate, again, that there is the real possibility of that increase being a factor of ten.) That’s just a little (a lot) scary (but maybe good scary?). 

If/since the Abbott episode airs before the Sunny one (in which we know the Sunny characters are going to have to be censored), the Sunny episode, which will absolutely be as raw and uncensored as the rest of the show, is going to be major whiplash for anyone not well-familiar with Sunny and its dark satire. The reactions to this crossover are certainly going to span quite the range of responses on social media, and I think it's pretty obvious to us Sunny fans that we should brace for impact once this episode airs. 

Whether that impact be an influx of people discovering, understanding, and enjoying Sunny, excited to hop into the fandom and dig into these characters, or people watching and being completely appalled by the show, upset at everyone who loves it, will only be revealed with airing, but an impact will certainly be made. 

Do we panic? Do we celebrate? Should the blog start pumping out media literacy guides? Haha, jk... I'm sure our new viewers will be great... right?

From the bars of the Paddy's Pub gate,

Seth