Abbott/Always Sunny crossover cut story about Frank and Mr. Johnson dating the same person

Despite some head-scratching back when it was announced, the Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia crossover didn’t just work. It worked so well that a whole bunch of material didn’t even make it into the final cut of the episode (“Volunteers,” which aired last night). It was no surprise that Always Sunny‘s Frank (Danny DeVito) and Abbott‘s Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis) would play well off each other, but in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Abbott producers Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker shared that there were initially plans to give the characters even more history than we saw on screen. 

“We did at one point have a whole backstory between Frank and Mr. Johnson that they did know each other,” Schumacker said. “It was that they went to high school together. They dated the same woman who was a canonical character in Sunny, this character Dynasty. That ended up falling away just as a function of, ‘Hey, we can’t tell that story. Maybe let’s save it for another time.'”

While “21 and a half minutes is not a lot of time to tell a story,” we’ll hopefully see more of the two men’s chemistry (and potentially their raccoon-trapping antics) when the Always Sunny portion of the crossover airs later this year. “Dennis is the key” to that episode, according to Quinta Brunson, which is nice to keep in mind because we barely got to see him in this week’s installment. (Schumacker explained that actor Glenn Howerton had a filming conflict, so Abbott only had him for half a day.) 

If you were skeptical about this whole thing (it would be hard not to be, even a little bit), have no fear: somehow, it actually worked. “‘Volunteers’… doesn’t undercut the ABC sitcom’s wholesomeness or It’s Always Sunny’s pure chaos, instead reveling in the odd mashup,” Saloni Gajjar wrote of the episode for The A.V. Club. “In fact, ‘Volunteers’ is one of the best examples of a TV crossover.”