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

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.