![]() ![]() While many other sitcoms have come and gone, amid the rise of prestige television, this scrappy underdog has quietly continued to develop its cult following. In 2008, Jonathan Storm of The Philadelphia Inquirer described the show as “like Seinfeld on crack”, which FX adopted as a tagline. It achieved particular popularity with university students, especially those based in Philadelphia (although almost all of the show is shot on soundstages in Los Angeles). It would be remiss to suggest that the rest was history, and that It’s Always Sunny hit its stride purely because of the addition of one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars to its main cast – but certainly the cultural cache that Devito brought helped the show become a cult hit. Thus came Danny Devito, cast as Dee and Dennis’s rich absentee father, Frank. It also struggled in the ratings, and so McElhenney and co were instructed to add a big-name star to the cast for the second series in a bid to improve its performance. However, despite garnering largely positive reviews, not everyone was a fan in a 2005 review for Entertainment Weekly, Gillian Flynn – who would go on to become the best-selling author of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects – said “it is smug enough to think it's breaking ground, but not smart enough to know it isn't”. Against the backdrop of a cautious, post-9/11, second-Bush-term US, the show was a breath of fresh air. The general tone of sitcoms of the period was considerably lighter and less risqué than It’s Always Sunny: in the first season alone, topics covered included underage drinking, cancer, and gun control. The same year, CBS premiered How I Met Your Mother, and NBC’s remake of The Office first aired. But while the per-episode budget of $450,000 was a considerable improvement on nothing, it was still less than a third of the network standard, positioning the show as an underdog right from the off.įollowing slight tweaks from its pilot iteration, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was born, centring on a group of terrible friends who run Paddy’s Pub together: Charlie (Charlie Day), Mac (Rob McElhenney), Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and his sister Dee (Caitlin Olsen). After shopping their homemade DVD to various networks, it was enough to convince Fox subsidiary channel FX to give them the go-ahead for a full series. Utilising their inordinate amount of free time as unemployed thespians, they cobbled together a pilot episode, shot on a digital camcorder with no budget. The concept was simple – as Howerton explained to the New York Times in a 2007 interview, it was to focus on “a group of friends who care so little for each other”. It was initially conceived as a short film after its stars and co-creators Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day met in Los Angeles, where they were all out-of-work actors trying to catch a break. It’s also become one of its longest-running – this week the show returns for a historic 14th season, a feat only matched by the rather more wholesome 1950s classic The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. ![]() ![]() In the process, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has become the best sitcom in the US, tackling everything from gun reform to Time’s Up with an irreverent, unmistakable lens. It eschews both the middle-class minutiae of Seinfeld, and the will-they-won’t-they romances of Friends – in favour of crystal meth, kitten mittens, and accidental kidnappings. However, there is another show about a group of quirky friends living in one of the US’s biggest cities that has quietly become a phenomenon in their wake. So too does Friends, which has just turned 25 and is still the subject of formidable bidding wars between streaming services hungry for the re-run rights. The “show about nothing”, created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, ran for nine seasons from 1989 until it ended in 1998, but clearly still lives large in US viewers’ consciousness. In a 2012 poll conducted by 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, Seinfeld was voted the greatest American sitcom of all time, edging out tough competition from the likes of The Honeymooners, Friends, Cheers and Arrested Development. ![]()
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