The Gang goes to Ireland, as season 15 of It’s Always Sunny hits its stride

Photo: Prashant Gupta/FXX

“If I’ve gotta stop mid-rant every time I want to order a beer, it’s going to interrupt my flow.”

Luckily for us (if not for Dee) the first two episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s extended vacation to the Emerald Isle rarely impedes anybody’s flow. Not Frank, who, we discover, has a typically Frank Reynolds-esque ulterior motive. Not Mac, whose prideful excitement at visiting the old McDonald ancestral homestead instead leads him to a McDonalds, and the deflating revelation that he got that shamrock thigh tattoo for nothing. And certainly not Dee and Dennis, whose misadventures in unlikely Irish TV stardom (as “obnoxious American MILF number one”) and as obnoxious American anti-vaxxer potentially infecting all of Ireland, respectively, spiral calamitously out of control.

And then there’s Charlie, whose innocent lifelong correspondence with his pen pal/imaginary friend Shelley Kelly turns out to have been a very real correspondence with a man now claiming to be his actual father. Partway through “The Gang’s Still In Ireland,” Charlie tracks down Shelley to his cheese shop where, with Frank boorishly hawking all over Shelley Kelly’s wares while abusing the jam-tasting policy, we first see Shelley, dispatching a rat with a large stick. Yup, it’s looking like Charlie’s met his real dad.

Taking the Gang out of Philly has been done before, of course, but this episodes-long Irish interlude (the Gang is still in Ireland at the end of “The Gang’s Still In Ireland”) is a big swing in a season that’s emerged with uncharacteristic wobbliness out of the Season 15 gate. But while an eventful overseas jaunt might smack of the late-run desperation of 80s sitcoms like The Facts Of Life or Family Ties, where creators try to brush off the gathering moss by plunging their aging characters into some disposable, colorful comic intrigue, this two-parter (written by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton and directed by Megan Ganz) hits the ground in deliriously confident stride.

Those shows invariably introduced some continental antagonists (usually sneaky foreign spy types) to bedevil their heroes’ on-location R&R. But the Gang doesn’t need any outside help in ramping up international incident into comic chaos. The Gang is chaos, and Ireland, thus far, largely plays straight-country to their imported depredations.

Frank, as it turns out, has long been (through the shell company that is Frank’s Fluids, LLC) the number one beverage supplier to Jeffrey Epstein, leading to his frenzied efforts to destroy all evidence of his association with the late, disturbingly well-connected sex trafficker. “95 percent of what went on down there was not pedophilia,” alibis Frank, assuring a horrified Dee and Dennis that he was only a frequent visitor to Epstein’s crime island for the snorkeling.

On another show, Frank’s even tangential proximity to one of the most notorious (and ongoing) investigations into a rats’ nest of wealthy sex criminals might test audience empathy. But this is Frank, whose pig-rooting wallow in the hedonistic existence his wealth has enabled is Sunny’s atavistic punching bag of old-school bigotry and all-around throwback awfulness. The Gang’s Boomer representative has always been there to counterbalance the tortuous self-exoneration of the four younger members. Frank is the gluttonous, rutting, stripped-bare id of the Gang’s collectively fetid identity.

So I can totally buy both that Frank would want no part of that whole pedophilia thing and that he’d happily make a ton of money selling booze to and splashing around with the rich and powerful people who very much did. And that, with the heat closing in, he’d dragoon his sort-of children into his scheme to stuff the shredded Frank’s Fluids paper trail into the peat-stove (and occasional untended craft beer vat) in every pub in Ireland. (The fact that nobody is taken aback at Frank’s offhand term “shred and spread” for his coverup spree is another instance of Sunny’s brilliant use of shorthand to hint at just how commonplace such shenanigans are.)

Dee’s complicity in evidence-tampering notwithstanding, her thespian’s dreams are inevitably dashed before they begin. If Frank’s the moral punching bag, then Dee’s the actual one, as her frenzied attempts to make one single call time for her big break are thwarted by, well, let’s see: Getting blackout drunk, drugged, and essentially kidnapped by the guys (who trade in her first class ticket for five coaches); getting creamed by two separate automobiles on the Irish roads (one driven by Dennis, defiantly on the wrong side of the street); being unpresentably disfigured by horrific, car-related head wounds; getting essentially kidnapped again, and stuffed into Dennis’ boot after he runs her over; having her plum role stolen by the vacationing Waitress (in the least elegant plot twist of the two episodes); and ultimately stalked and potentially beheaded by her own brother. (Tune in next week to see.)

In that latter case, Dennis, ditching the Gang’s rural one-room accommodations, rents himself and Dee a decrepit castle, which may or may not be haunted by a head-chopping ghost. Naturally, the clear indication that the unvaccinated Dennis is afflicted with fast-moving COVID is probably behind his late-night axe-happy cliffhanger attack on his sister, but the episodes lay in enough further details of Dennis’ psychopathic tendencies to at least suggest he was ripe for some head-hungry possessing spirit. Approaching a redheaded Irish bartender, Dennis leaps right into dead-eyed fury once his COVID-numbed nose can’t smell the pure scent he’d imagined a true Irish ginger would possess. “The hair is on the head,” the feverish Dennis mumbles menacingly as he pursues Dee through their castle’s cobwebby corridors in his delirium, “The hair is a lie.”

If Dennis is the episodes’ ugly, contagious American, Mac is the Yank boorishly seeking validation in his connection to the motherland. The twist (revealed in gloriously unconcerned grunts from Mac’s mom over the phone) that Mac’s entire, self-styled identity as the Irish badass bouncer of a pub named Paddy’s is all a careless lie cooked up by his criminal father (whose real name turns out to have been Luther Vandross) knocks Mac once more off his pins. Ranting to the guys that he doesn’t know who he is any more, the episode gives Dennis the trenchantly fed-up response, “Identity doesn’t have to factor into absolutely every decision you make.”

But, for Mac, identity is all he has. Ass-kicker, Irish, Catholic, Gay—the joke has never been whether Mac was or was not those things, but how desperately he’s thrown himself into various roles in a quest for self-validation. Mac the neglected son of two truly shitty parents (although not as shitty as Charlie’s), struggling to reconcile his sexuality with what his religion said about his sexuality. Mac the easily bruised son of a terrifying thug and a monosyllabic lump. Each successive, monomaniacal plunge into the deep end of whatever identity he thinks will earn him love and respect and belonging that week turns Mac into the Gang’s running joke.

Here, the discovery that he’s Dutch on both maternal and paternal sides (so, double-Dutch), is treated cavalierly by Charlie as the pair wreck an Irish hall of records. (“You Dutch?,” Charlie asks airily after hearing Mac’s side of the transatlantic call.) But for Mac, it’s yet another hammer-blow to whatever rickety edifice of self-esteem and borrowed glory he’s managed to construct, with Mac’s lament to Frank, Charlie, and Dennis yet another fumbling attempt to find just one person who’ll empathize. Mac’s explanation that some element of himself has to be “first” in determining how to live is the sort deft Sunny characterization that will break your heart if you think about it too long.

Being Mac, however, no existential dilemma can’t be diverted with a Hail Mary grand gesture, so he heads right to the nearest church and, interrupting a mass in a funny reveal, unloads his dilemma on the bewildered priest in graphic detail. Again, being Mac, this pell-mell rush to the seminary is awash in unintentional double entendre “I only want one man inside me,” Mac states eagerly, before amending his desire to enter the priesthood to include the whole Trinity. Mac’s Irish-ness stripped from him, and his homosexuality proving as unfulfilling as his early-series womanizing (Mac did apparently have a real-life threesome at some point, which, good for Mac), Catholicism is now “first,” and therefore, he hurls himself right into priestly study with an inappropriately hunky seminarian. “Yeah, I ain’t falling in love with Gus,” Mac notes happily upon the priest swapping in a pudding-faced fellow student for the long-haired fella who sent Mac reeling on a serious REO Speedwagon-scored backslide.

The heart of this typically—and hilariously—destructive five-person international incident is Charlie. That’s often the case, as Charlie Kelly’s place in the Gang is secured less by overweening greed, pride, gluttony, or pick another deadly sin, but from the simple fact that there’s no place else in the world where he’d be accepted. For all the backbreaking “Charlie work,” and the abuse, and the fact that (as we found out last week) he’s been cheated out of his rightful place as Paddy’s primary owner, the Gang needs Charlie as much as Charlie needs the Gang.

Or does he? Here, after some prime Charlie misunderstanding about his ostensible father’s occupation (“Is he a mongrel or a monster? Thats all I want to know,” Charlie clarifies upon hearing the word “cheesemonger”), Charlie Kelly discovers a door. It’s sadly, inevitably likely, that Meaney’s gruff but affectionate Shelley will turn out to be a disappointment to Charlie. I mean, the pan pal thing was nice, if a little creepy, but the fact that Shelley never told Charlie, in their “gibberish” language that only Charlie could understand (he’s fluent in Gaelic, as it turns out) that he was a lonely, neglected little boy’s real dad is pretty telling.

Still, what a lovely and boisterously believable scene it is when, over drinks at a pub (where every man there also had a fondly remembered turn with Mrs. Kelly), Charlie picks up on the drunken song that Shelley booms out. We know that (in addition to surreptitiously brilliant bar management) Charlie has an improbable talent for music. So it just works when Charlie (Charlie Day making Charlie Kelly’s eyes dance with discovery) matches his father’s lyrics with affectionately apt improvisations of his own. Both Meaney and Day are so in the moment that it makes what could have been contrived, sublime. With the whole bar delightedly chiming in (apart from Frank, distracted with extracting a jam-seed from his bridgework with a metal screw), Charlie and Shelley Kelly raise their glasses and sing, “The Kelly lads, the Kelly boys, we sing, we laugh, we make our noise!”

Taking Charlie and the bloody-mouthed Frank back to his warmly cosy cottage (“This place is charming as shit!,” Frank blurts), Shelley is taken aback at Frank’s assertion that he and Charlie will share the single cot in the living room. And so is Charlie. (He’s not even on board for recounting the time Frank pooped the bed.) Brushing aside Frank’s obvious distress at the pair’s scummy co-existence being so publicly dismissed, Charlie calls out as Shelley ascends the stairs to his room, trying out the phrase, “Goodnight… Dad” with such exquisite hesitancy that I felt the futile bloom of unexpected hope. Hope that, maybe this time, Charlie Kelly has found a father figure who will not only acknowledge him, but actually treat him with something like human respect.

Danny DeVito echoes the line when Frank, sat alone on the cot, watches a deep-in-thought Charlie close his guest room door and says a lonely little, “Goodnight, Charlie” to the now-empty room. The second episode ends there.

It’s Always Sunny toys with us as skillfully as it finds new and funny ways for the Gang to get into trouble. Dee, Dennis, Mac, Frank, and Charlie are as toxic as five Philly nogoodniks can be, but Sunny always—always—reminds us that the Gang is us. And so when Mac has an epiphany in an unfortunate therapist’s office that he’s not even sure his so-called friends even like him (or he them), the momentary flash of self awareness has to be snuffed out so that the show can continue. When Dee hits rock bottom and submits to the guys’ incessant personal abuse without fighting back, she has to be cruelly and elaborately re-crushed so the show can continue.

Dennis can leave with a woman and a child he’d forgotten about for the Paddy’s-less wilds of North Dakota, telling his skeptical sort-of father, “You know what, Frank? I’ll figure it out. Because I don’t want my kid to grow up like I did, with some asshole dad who’s never even around.” But then he’s back for the next season’s premiere without an explanation, fatherhood hardly ever mentioned again. And even Frank gets his show-breaking moment, as we get what remains a shocking glimpse of just how disconnected the aging and brain-battered Frank is from what’s going on around him. That episode ends in Frank’s point-0f-view shot, as we hear him croaking out with childlike glee at his and Charlie’s bedtime game of Night Crawlers. “It’s stirring! It’s stirring!,” the transported Frank cries, swept away on Charlie’s mad tale of a welcoming fairyland, even for the likes of them.

It’s a maddeningly tough balance to find, and the fact that Sunny can still tiptoe right up to the edge so expertly remains a miracle of long-form TV storytelling. (I know some claim that things tipped too far when “Mac Finds His Pride,” but I disagree. Wholeheartedly.) These two episodes give each member of the Gang enough narrative and thematic rope to allow them just a peek at the emerald sunlight outside of Paddy’s, Philly, and their rats’ nest of misdeeds and entanglements. They’re still awful, naturally. (Dennis’ denial about his COVID status sees him uproariously failing to stifle his red-faced coughing in front of a friendly realtor.) But “The Gang Goes To Ireland” and “The Gang’s Still In Ireland” serve as a skillfully constructed scaffold for when those five ropes inevitably snap taut.

Stray observations

• Each episode begins with Charlie urging everyone to waft the restorative power of stew into an unconscious Dee’s face.
• In addition to using a dingy Irish office as a tax shelter, and enabling the flow of intoxicants to a sex offender’s fuck island, Frank also abandoned the office cat to become petrified into the carpet. RIP, Ralphie.
• While Frank maintains his innocence as to the more illegal and horrifying acts, he does seem to imply that real-life Epstein associate Bill Gates was really into manatees on that island.
• Mac, as soon as Frank mentions his threat to kill himself over his just-discovered Dutch-ness: “I’m not really gonna do it, it’s a cry for help.”
• I’ve seen online speculation about what members of The Gang would not get vaccinated. Only Dennis, as it turns out. Huh.
• “Go to the old bell tower and ring the goddamned bell, you bitch!!” I’m in for The Gang to remake The Shining next, with Dennis and Dee as Jack and Wendy.