When I first had the idea to do an Always Sunny post, I was going to do my Top 25 episodes, but I couldn’t narrow it down that far. Then I was going to power rank every season of the show, and even that was too tough for me. For one thing, my personal preferences in terms of the show basically change every day, and for the other, it’s so tough to choose one great episode or season over another.
For more than a decade now, Always Sunny has consistently delivered laugh-out-loud funny television with a serious lack of critical recognition. They’ve developed an incredible lead cast as well as the best group of recurring side characters this side of Seinfeld. Given all of the recent developments in both the show (Dennis’ departure at the end of last season) and in real life (the Eagles winning the Super Bowl), I’m very excited to see what the show’s 13th season has to hold. So, without further ado, here’s a comprehensive breakdown of all twelve seasons of Always Sunny:
Season 1
Highlights: “Underage Drinking: A National Concern,” “Gun Fever,” “Charlie Has Cancer”
The show’s first season set the tone for the rest of the series. It showed off Rob McIlhenney, Glenn Howerton, and Charlie Day’s twisted sense of humor, and laid the groundwork for just how selfish and manipulative The Gang truly could be. It’s very funny, but as with most sitcoms, the show was still trying to figure a few things out, and Danny DeVito’s absence is definitely noticeable when you go back and rewatch this season.
In this season, we see Paddy’s turn into a gay bar, a bunch of high schoolers go to Paddy’s for some underage drinking, Charlie lying about having cancer so he can have a better shot with The Waitress, and we’re introduced to the McPoyles as they blackmail Charlie into winning a sexual abuse lawsuit against their elementary school gym teacher. After writing that out, it’s hard to believe that this show only gets more sick, twisted, and ridiculous.
Season 2
Highlights: “Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare,” “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom,” “Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody’s Ass,” “The Gang Goes Jihad”
Season 2 featured the introduction of Frank Reynolds, who would go on to become one of the show’s most important characters. As a matter of fact, FX told McIlhenney, Howerton, and Day that if they didn’t add a more famous actor to The Gang, the show would get canned. DeVito ended up being a valuable addition who has given the show some of its best moments.
As for the season itself, we see The Gang continue their downward spiral from the first season, except with the wealthy Frank behind them bankrolling all of their exploits. In this season, we see the gang make an al-Qaeda style tape threatening the new owner of their building, Dennis and Dee quitting their jobs at Paddy’s to go on welfare, Mac banging Dennis’ mom, and Dennis and Mac entering Charlie into an underground street fighting ring. This is also the season in which we first see just how illiterate Charlie is during Dennis’ campaign speech in The Gang Runs for Office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROCKGuuviis
This is also the season in which we first meet Rickety Cricket (The Gang Exploits a Miracle), whose life falls apart immediately after reuniting with Dee. Overall, it’s a very solid, very funny season that’s not as outlandish as some of the later seasons are.
Season 3
Highlights: “The Gang Finds a Dumpster Baby,” “The Gang Gets Invincible,” “The Gang Gets Held Hostage,” “Mac is a Serial Killer,” “The Gang Gets Whacked,” “The Gang Dances Their Asses Off”
Season 3 is the longest season of the show, and it’s also when Always Sunny really started to hit its stride. The season begins with Dennis, Dee, and Mac finding a baby in the Paddy’s Pub dumpster, and it only gets crazier from there. This season, we see The Gang try out for the Eagles (it goes pretty much exactly how you would expect):
They also get held hostage in the bar by the McPoyles, convince Dee that the up-and-coming rapper she’s dating has a mental disability, carry out an investigation to see whether or not Mac is a serial killer (he’s not, he’s just having an affair with Carmen, the transgender Paddy’s patron we meet in the first season), and accidentally get tied up with the mafia after finding some of their nose clams:
In the season finale, Charlie accidentally puts Paddy’s up as a prize in a local radio show dance contest (“Your illiteracy has screwed us again!”), wrapping up the season in which we really get an idea of how borderline sociopathic the gang truly is.
Season 4
Highlights: “Mac’s Banging the Waitress,” “Mac and Charlie Die,” “Who Pooped the Bed?” “The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell,” “The Nightman Cometh”
The fourth season picks up right where the third leaves off. The run that the show goes on in this season is nothing short of impressive: Mac tries to sleep with The Waitress because he thinks Charlie destroyed one of his Project Badass tapes, Mac and Charlie fake their own deaths because they’re scared that Mac’s dad is going to kill them, they spend an episode trying to figure out whether it was Frank or Charlie who pooped in their shared bed, they kidnap a newspaper columnist who called Paddy’s “the worst bar in Philadelphia,” Dennis tries to get his erotic memoirs published, Dee has a heart attack, the guys try to get Paddy’s turned into an historical landmark, and The Gang kidnaps and then accidentally destroys the home of a local Hispanic family.
The pièce de résistance, however, comes in the season finale. Charlie, in a last-ditch attempt to get The Waitress to love him, writes a musical based on his Nightman character from Season 3. As you might expect, not everything goes exactly the way Charlie planned. Mac and Dennis get competitive over who is the better singer/showman, Dee has problems with some of the song lyrics (to be fair, they make it seem like she’s reeeeeeally into underage guys), and Frank doesn’t do much to stop the people from thinking that the Nightman is just some guy who pays for the opportunity to rape a young boy:
It turns out that the whole musical was just a front so that Charlie could propose to The Waitress with the musical number from above. Just a brilliant episode to top off a brilliant season of TV.
Season 5
Highlights: “The Gang Gives Frank an Intervention,” “The World Series Defense,” “Paddy’s Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens,” “Mac and Dennis Break Up,” “The D.E.N.N.I.S. System,” “The Gang Reignites the Rivalry”
Season 5 continues the heyday of Always Sunny. It features several of my favorite episodes of the series (the highlights from this season are so, so good). Here, we see Frank try to become “as depraved as possible” (and we’re introduced to Gail the Snail, Dennis and Dee’s garbage pail cousin), Charlie’s reaction to the news that the waitress is engaged (the scene where Dennis and Mac try to create a dating profile for Charlie is an all-timer), The Gang trying to create Paddy’s merchandise to sell at the bar, Mac and Dennis deciding to go on a break after Dee call out for being completely dependent on each other, and The Gang reigniting their flip cup rivalry with another local bar.
Season 5 also contains a few of the most rewatchable clips in the show. The most obvious one comes in The World Series Defense, when Dee reads Mac’s love letter to Chase Utley aloud in court:
We’re also introduced to the D.E.N.N.I.S. System, Dennis’ comprehensive approach to seduction that he has perfected over the years:
Overall, this is just an excellent season, no matter which way you put it.
Season 6
Highlights: “Mac Fights Gay Marriage,” “Dennis Gets Divorced,” “Who Got Dee Pregnant?” “The Gang Gets a New Member,” “Dee Reynolds: Shaping America’s Youth,” “A Very Sunny Christmas”
Always Sunny’s sixth season is the first time we really see the show experiment with storylines that run through multiple episodes (Mac Fights Gay Marriage into Dennis Gets Divorced; The Gang Gets a New Member into Dee Reynolds: Shaping America’s Youth). It’s the only time other than two-part episodes like The Gang Gets Whacked and Mac and Charlie Die that we see the show do so, and they do it very well. All four of these episodes are great on their own, but in pairs, they’re truly hilarious.
In this season, we also see the gang buy a P-Diddy esque shrimping boat, the guys try to figure out who got Dee pregnant at Paddy’s annual Halloween party (with some help from Artemis and the McPoyles), Charlie take a mental health/spa/spaghetti day while The Gang tries to put together a surprise birthday party for him, Dennis and Charlie meet Chase Utley and Ryan Howard while Dee, Mac, and Frank are stranded in the woods, Dee gives birth to Carmen and her husband’s baby, and the show’s only-ever Christmas episode. All told, it’s arguably one of the best seasons of the show.
Season 7
Highlights: “CharDee MacDennis: The Game of Games,” “The Gang Gets Trapped,” “How Mac Got Fat,” “Thunder Gun Express,” “The High School Reunion”
The seventh season is when the show really starts to develop the weird sense of humor that has become its calling card in the more recent seasons. For one thing, Mac is suddenly fat in this season and it isn’t explained at all until the tenth episode of the season. We also see Frank almost marry his favorite prostitute, The Gang goes to the Jersey Shore out of nostalgia and ends up with a…different kind of beach experience, and The Gang preparing for an incoming hurricane that local news stations are calling “The Storm of the Century.”
My personal favorites from this season come when we are introduced to The Gang’s homemade board game, CharDee MacDennis (a violent drinking game that mashes up the rules of every famous board game), when we see The Gang try to escape from a house they broke into to retrieve an “ancient artifact” (a vase from the 18th century recently sold at a museum auction), the story of Mac’s sudden weight gain, The Gang’s attempt to fight through traffic to see the blockbuster movie Thunder Gun Express, and The Gang’s high school reunion. For me this season starts out strong, gets a little slow in the middle, and then gets back on track and finishes strong at the end.
Season 8
Highlights: “The Gang Gets Analyzed,” “The Gang Dines Out,” “Reynolds vs. Reynolds: The Cereal Defense”
Season 8 is one of the weaker seasons of the show for me. Its highlights are very good, and it has a few solid episodes, but when compared to other seasons of the show, it doesn’t particularly stand out.
Standout episodes include The Gang interfering with Maureen Ponderosa’s wedding to Liam McPoyle (Dennis wants to make sure that the wedding happens so he can stop paying alimony while Frank and Dee agree to help Ryan McPoyle break it up), The Gang seeing a therapist as a group to decide who should wash the dishes after a group dinner, The Gang spending a night out at Guigino’s, the nicest restaurant in Philadelphia, and a full-on trial held in the bar after Frank rear-ends Dennis on the way to work. It’s an okay season, but kind of weak by Always Sunny standards.
Season 9
Highlights: “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award,” “Mac Day,” “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 6”
Season 9 is on a similar level to the eighth season for me. It has its high points, but overall, it’s a fairly forgettable season when compared to the rest of the show. The high points include the guys convincing Dee that she’s finally made it big as a standup comedian, a look at “Mac Day,” a day in which everyone has to do everything that Mac wants to do without complaining at all, The Gang getting caught in a convenience store during a robbery and imagining how they would go about saving the day, and The Gang making and pitching their homemade Lethal Weapon 6 to different investors.
My favorite episode of this season is The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award. This episode is a thinly-veiled metaphor for Always Sunny itself never gaining any real critical claim, despite years of commercial success and a die-hard fan base. In the episode, The Gang tries everything to win an award for Paddy’s: They go to another award-winning bar to see what it is that they do right (bright colors, will-they-won’t-they tension between two bartenders, one black guy in the mix to prove that it’s diverse enough), Charlie writes a song, and they even try to emulate a burlesque bar to see if they can win an award for being edgy. Eventually, they get tired of acting like they’re something they’re not, and they yell and spit at the awards committee (see above).
Season 10
Highlights: “The Gang Beats Boggs,” “Charlie Work,” “The Gang Spies Like U.S.,” “The Gang Goes on Family Fight”
The show’s tenth season is a lot stronger than the two that immediately preceded it. It’s still only ten episodes long, but the quality of the episodes is up a lot from the eighth and ninth season. In the season premiere, we see The Gang try to beat Wade Boggs’ drinking record of 70 beers on a cross-country flight, everyone attempting to online date, Dennis and Mac sending Dee across the street to spy on a neighboring fish factory so they can watch online porn, Mac setting out to prove that his dad is innocent in a murder trial, and The Gang going on a Family Feud-style game show.
The two best episodes of the season are the fifth and sixth, Charlie Work and The Gang Misses the Boat. In Charlie Work, Charlie tries to get the bar to pass health inspection while everyone else tries to carry out a crazy chicken and airline miles scheme. The episode features one of the best-directed scenes of the whole series, a longshot of Charlie scrambling to make sure everything can operate smoothly.
The Gang Misses the Boat is another metaphorical episode. In it, Dennis realizes just how weird The Gang has become (“Dee is in a Goddamn costume every other day! I think we have more costumes in the bar than we do kegs!”), and so he tries to sell his Land Rover and start anew. As you might expect, it doesn’t go as planned:
Meanwhile, Mac tries to reestablish himself as a party boy (which ultimately ends up providing more evidence that he’s actually gay), Frank accidentally ruins some new bar owners’ lives, and Charlie and Dee realize that the rest of The Gang really affects the way they think. (Charlie also admits that he eats the beak when he eats chicken). The Gang ends up agreeing that they should just go back to the way things were before the breakup.
Season 11
Highlights: “CharDee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo,” “The Gang Hits the Slopes,” “McPoyle vs. Ponderosa: The Trial of the Century,” “Charlie Catches a Leprechaun,” “The Gang Goes to Hell”
The show’s eleventh season carries the momentum over from its tenth. It starts out with the second round of CharDee MacDennis we’ve seen onscreen, and includes gems like an 80s ski movie parody (where we also see a ridiculous sex scene between Charlie and Tatiana, Frank’s prostitute), an entire episode from Frank’s point of view (not a ridiculously funny episode, but I like it because they’re trying to keep things fresh), the series’ first St. Patrick’s Day episode (where Charlie sets a glue trap to catch a leprechaun), and end with The Gang nearly dying after boarding a doomed Christian cruise ship.
The season’s best episode is its seventh, McPoyle vs. Ponderosa: The Trial of the Century. Any time we see The Gang in a courtroom setting, it’s great, and here we see Charlie at his most lawyerish. The trial is regarding the incident at Maureen Ponderosa’s would-be wedding to Liam McPoyle at which Bill Ponderosa spiked the bowl of milk with bath salts. Charlie and his Uncle Jack are defending Bill, while the lawyer that The Gang has terrorized for years is defending the McPoyles. As you might expect, there is a serious lack of order in the court, and we end up with a lot of moments like the one in the video above.
Season 12
Highlights: “The Gang Goes to a Water Park,” “Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer,” “Hero or Hate Crime?” “PTSDee,” “A Cricket’s Tale”
Season 12 is a good-but-not-great season. It has a lot of funny moments, but not a ton of standout stuff. The season premiere is a musical episode in which a strange accident makes The Gang look black to everyone but themselves. There’s also funny episodes about The Gang’s exploits at a water park, Frank’s shell beverage company accidentally becoming the officially sponsor of Boko Haram, and Dee’s habit of unwittingly ruining the lives of every man she dates.
The big highlights of this season for me come from the episodes Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer and A Cricket’s Tale. Similarly to Being Frank, they’re episodes that show that the show is still willing to try new things. The former episode is a parody of Making a Murderer, showing a documentary made by Mac that connects Dennis to the suspicious death of Maureen Ponderosa. The latter is an episode that follows Rickety Cricket for a day in his life. It’s about as hectic as you would expect it to be, with Cricket nearly saving his family’s company, but ends with the revelation that Cricket has been hallucinating on PCP the whole time.
Oh yeah, in the season finale, it’s revealed that Dennis has been hiding a secret family, and at the end, he decides to leave The Gang behind to be with his son and the child’s mother:
We haven’t really been given a straight answer as to whether Dennis will be back this season, but I sure hope he is. Here’s the trailer for Season 13, which debuts next Wednesday, September 5 on FXX:
Mac looks like a 10. The rumors that Mindy Kaling is joining the show appear to be true. I can’t wait to see what the show has up its sleeve for the 13th season.
ReJoyce 