The 10 most outrageous moments from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia

If provocative comedy was an Olympic sporting event, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia would get extra credit for degree of difficulty. The series gleefully, and with deceptive skill, cannonballs into the fetid community pool that is Paddy’s Pub, the decrepit and improbably still solvent Philly bar from which Dee (Kaitlin Olson), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Charlie (Charlie Day), Mac (Rob McElhenney), and Frank (Danny DeVito) venture forth and inevitably return. And, sure, the Gang is heading for a COVID-fleeing jaunt to Ireland for much of season 15, but—as they’ve demonstrated so ably since debuting in 2005—you can take the Gang out of Paddy’s, but their collective stink never quite washes off.And hallelujah for that. The genius of It’s Always Sunny is its steadfast focus on how its five main characters embody the worst of us (as a country, as a species), and how they will never, ever better themselves. What saves this marathon of willful and actual ignorance, thoughtlessness, and often predatory self-obsession from mere braying nihilism is how carefully each outrage perpetrated by the Gang is plucked from squalor with a shockingly nimble delicacy—then honed, shaped, and ultimately deployed to refract our collective failings into grotesque (and hilarious) shapes. The Gang is us, whether we want to acknowledge their disreputable kinship or not. As with any ambitious balance beam routine, it doesn’t always stick the landing, but It’s Always Sunny almost never uses outrage or shock as ends in themselves. Each episode’s conflict, scheme, or straight-up felonious affront to Philly society is merely catalyst for the Gang’s ever-simmering pressure cooker to start whistling. You never want to find yourself in the Gang’s blast zone, but you can take some comfort in knowing that their crimes are going to take them down as well.Choosing just 10 of the most outrageous moments in It’s Always Sunny history is something of a fool’s errand. But, as the Gang continues to show us, a dedicated fool (or five) can do a lot of damage.

The initial, Danny DeVito-less season saw It’s Always Sunny planting its flag on as many hot-button issues as possible. In this episode, it’s the abortion debate, as the news that Charlie supposedly fathered a child sends him, Dennis, and Mac on their own disastrously self-interested journeys into that particular minefield. The fatherless Charlie’s abortive attempts to bond with the deeply unpleasant child are at least rooted in some sense of personal responsibility, but Dennis and Mac’s infiltration of both sides of the local pro- and anti-choice ranks is motivated purely by their desire to get laid. And while Mac successfully lures a rabid activist into a handy backseat (by hinting at his nonexistent role as abortionist-murdering zealot), her subsequent pregnancy announcement sees him immediately urging the young woman right into the very women’s health clinic they’d been picketing.

The running joke of Dennis and Dee’s decrepit grandfather having been a full-on Nazi is never meant to explain why the Reynolds siblings are the way that they are. In fact, the Gang is horrified at the revelations in these episodes that their semi-beloved Pop-Pop is a racist monster, that they were whisked off to Hitler Youth day camp without realizing it, and that Pop-Pop’s storage unit may be home to some of failed painter Hitler’s lost artworks. (Rejecting Nazis is a low bar, but credit where it’s due.) After trying to hawk the old man’s memorabilia to a horrified museum curator, Mac and Charlie ultimately decide to just burn it all behind Paddy’s (and hit Dennis with the news of his grandfather’s evil, just for fun). Still, trafficking as these linked episodes do in both Nazi regalia and the dying Pop-Pop’s vituperative racism is queasy stuff, with only the Gang’s collective no-win fates assuring viewers that Nazism doesn’t pay.

Sometimes a tableau only tells part of the story. Sure, “The Gang Finds A Dumpster Baby” ends with a social worker coming upon the titular abandoned baby in blackface, seemingly about to be bisected by Charlie, Frank, and Dennis with a scimitar. But it’s the journey—child endangerment, exploitation, and neglect—that lends that final shot such comedic power. Finding an adorable infant behind Paddy’s, the Gang’s first instinct is to re-abandon the tyke, only for Dee and Mac to imagine a life as lucrative stage parents. Meanwhile, Charlie finally pries from Frank and his mother the fact that he himself wasn’t so much abandoned as deliberately but incompletely aborted, with Frank refusing to acknowledge Charlie as his son. After finding out that white babies aren’t what advertisers are looking for these days, Dee and Mac unsuccessfully try quick-tanning the kid before whipping out the shoe polish, while the arguing Frank and Charlie fight over the shiny “Ali Baba sword” they found in their nightly dumpster-dives. And that’s where we came in, not having even mentioned how Dennis deceived a comely environmentalist into sex while ensuring the razing of an entire forest.

When the big reveal of a refrigerator full of multiple severed human heads isn’t the most upsetting thing in an episode, you know It’s Always Sunny is going for broke. Here, Mac’s suspicious absence from Paddy’s prompts the Gang to connect him to a string of serial murders, leading to an elaborate To Catch A Predator sting where they attempt to get their friend to confess to being an actual, head-chopping predator. And while the final reveal suggests that Frank, packing a chainsaw for maximum vigilantism, enacts gory justice on the actual killer, it’s the revelation that Mac’s been sleeping with transgender woman Carmen (Brittany Daniels) that truly upsets the Gang. An act both his Catholic guilt and fragile macho image condemns to secrecy, Mac’s seasons-long attraction to the proudly trans Carmen routinely sees the Gang referring to her with an offhand trans slur. Glenn Howerton apologized , noting that, unlike in later seasons, no member of the Gang piped up to even performatively object to the slur in order to make one of the others feel bad.

It’s Always Sunny seeds possible motivations for the Gang’s individual awfulness throughout its run, without ever positing those events and influences as sufficient excuse. Dennis, for example, might have been molested by his Rick Moranis-looking female school librarian as a young teen (an event Dennis steadfastly maintains is both no big deal and evidence of his sexual prowess), but that in no way explains . Here, cornered by a confused and increasingly alarmed Mac about his enthusiasm for purchasing a run-down houseboat, Dennis’ explanation of “the implication” that will prove the deciding factor in stranded-at-sea women’s choice to succumb to his will is one of the most succinctly creepy moments in TV history. The way Howerton makes Dennis’ eyes go black as he freezes Mac with his imagined narrative of very, very dubious consent encapsulates Dennis Reynolds’ inner darkness more than his trunkful of zip ties and duct tape.

The addition of Danny DeVito as Dennis and Dee’s rich and hedonistic father Frank saved It’s Always Sunny from cancellation. It also introduced Frank’s more retrograde, old-school awfulness to the rest of the Gang’s more complexly self-delusional mix of rationalization and tortuous justifications. Here, Frank’s plan to marry sex worker Roxy () sends the rest of the Gang scrambling, not so much out of concern, but because the whole thing is sort of gross and embarrassing to them. Frank’s blunt bigotry and misogyny is a tricky tool to work with, and there are times here when his disregard for the women in his life reaches unsettling depths. But no Sunny ending is more jaw-droppingly, go-for-broke insensitive than when Frank, finding that Roxy has overdosed right before their ceremony in his and Charlie’s filthy apartment, urges the Gang to just drag her body into the hallway. Frank, noting that that’s what Roxy would have wanted, walks off, as Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” plays over the spectacle of the woman’s splayed and lifeless body.

There’s nothing more triggering to a member of the Gang than when someone dares to suggest that their personal awfulness is worse than the Gang’s collective awfulness. So when Dee finds out that the male stripper she slept with the night before considers her his “rock bottom,” she hatches an elaborate scheme to prove she, instead, rocks. Luring her depressed conquest back to his abandoned stripper life with a triumphant comeback show at Paddy’s, it’s finally revealed that the young woman he’s been enthusiastically grinding on is in fact the daughter whose estrangement had contributed to his downward spiral into Dee’s bed. Sweet Dee’s perpetual marginalization makes her the victim more often than anyone in the Gang, but, when roused, she can enact truly terrifying vengeance. Here, crowing in magnificent villainy, “That’s your rock bottom—you sticking your dick in your daughter’s face, you son of a bitch!”, Dee shows herself to be as capable of wrecking lives as the guys should anyone set her off. When a shocked Dennis calls Dee’s manipulation the darkest thing she’s ever done, it’s with admiration as much as horror.

As comparatively endearing as Charlie Kelly can be, It’s Always Sunny never lets us forget the depths of his obsessive neediness, and how much damage he can do because of it. In this season eight episode, a chance car accident sees Dee and Charlie both wooed by a pair of ultra-rich Philly elites. Trevor Taft (Joshua Thomas Casaubon) turns out to be just the sort of douchebag frat boy you’d expect Dee to run afoul of, the episode’s denouement reveals the Taft family’s rich and beautiful daughter, Ruby (Alexandra Daddario), has actually fallen hard for Charlie, his ravenous cheese hunger and position as Paddy’s designated rat-dispatcher notwithstanding. Charlie’s series-long obsession with Mary Elizabeth Ellis’ deeply uninterested Waitress appears over, but as soon as he finds out she needs him again, Charlie deliver a stinging rebuke to the one woman who actually seems to reciprocate his love. Charlie (tinkling music mockingly scoring his tirade) tells Ruby icily, “You slept with me almost instantly—and by the way, a quality woman doesn’t do that. She doesn’t say yes right away, she says no to a man, for years, like, 10 years.” Charlie is as damaged as any character we’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean he’s safe to touch.

The season 12 opener not only sees the Gang awaken transformed into Black versions of themselves—played, this time, by Black actors and not the Gang . It’s also a musical episode, with the Gang fumbling their way through the Philly streets as they attempt to figure out how they got this way (and, to their increasing panic, how to turn back). As daring and ultimately successful an exercise in It’s Always Sunny’s sneakily insightful examination of the blinkered state of American racial politics, the true shock isn’t in Frank’s predictable reaction to seeing the world as a Black man (he really, really wants to say the n-word), but in the episode’s bloody and genuinely heartbreaking conclusion. Charlie, the one Gang member whose alter ego is a child (AJ Hudson), assures his friends that a carload of armed police summoned by a jittery shop owner are there to help, only for the toy train in his hand to be confused for a gun. Even if the episode turns out to be a brain-fried dream of Carl (Wil Garret—who’s mostly known as the Old Black Man on the show), the lightning-quick edits of the young Hudson’s chest exploding from the cops’ bullets slams the episode’s message home with a sickening, blood-red clarity. The Gang doesn’t ever learn, but that doesn’t mean It’s Always Sunny isn’t occasionally and shockingly illuminating.