The recent seasons of Sunny have been a mixed bag. Each year, It’s Always Sunny delivers a handful of great episodes and a handful of not-so-great ones, which is perfectly agreeable for a show whose season count is in the double digits. Season 15 was a lot more hit than miss, perhaps because the pandemic gave the writers longer to work out the story and character beats (season 14 hit the airwaves two years ago).
As with the return of most sitcoms in a post-COVID world, It’s Always Sunny kicked off its latest season with an obligatory episode about the pandemic. But it’s not what fans might expect from an Always Sunny COVID episode. Sunny already did an episode about the Gang being quarantined way back in season 9, so “2020: A Year in Review” takes an anthology-style approach to explain how the Gang was indirectly responsible for all the major events of the year: Mac and Dennis caused the recounts in the U.S. presidential election, Frank made Rudy Giuliani’s runny hair dye, and Dee and Charlie designed the costumes for the Capitol attack. The episode sticks the landing beautifully with the Gang digitally inserted into real footage of these events, wearing Kanye 2020 merchandise and looking confused by all the carnage around them.
After the COVID-centric premiere, “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7” took a meta turn as the Sunny writers addressed the racial insensitivity of previous episodes that have been removed from the Netflix library (or, in-universe, removed from the public library). The episode culminates in a hilariously ironic ending as the Gang is frustrated that their story is being told by somebody who doesn’t understand their experience.
The season’s third episode, “The Gang Buys a Roller Rink,” flashes back to 1998 and serves as an origin story for the Gang. When a show’s characters are as familiar and set in their ways as Sunny’s, one of the most fun things they can do is act wildly out of character. The younger versions of Dennis, Mac, and Charlie are really nice to Dee. Dennis is desperate for Frank’s approval and Dee is surrounded by adoring friends (until she bumps her head and becomes the obnoxious, hot-tempered narcissist that fans know and love today).
Arguably the season’s weakest episode, “The Gang Replaces Dee with a Monkey,” still has plenty of great moments. The A-plot with Dee’s acting class is aimless and disjointed and the entire B-plot only serves to set up the Gang’s impending four-episode trip to Ireland, but the central premise of a bartending monkey replacing Dee is hysterically in-character (and the line “Thank you, monkey,” repeated every time the monkey serves somebody a beer, never fails to get a laugh).
In its early days, It’s Always Sunny made its name as the anti-Friends, a decidedly unsentimental sitcom about a group of the worst people on Earth who only care about themselves. The series has explored a few emotionally charged moments – namely Mac coming out to his dad in the form of a dance in the season 13 finale – but the show traditionally avoids trying to make the audience feel and instead takes Seinfeld’s classic “No hugging, no learning” approach.
That all changed when the Gang went to Ireland for the second half of season 15. Usually, when the cast of a TV comedy goes abroad for a multi-episode arc, it’s an ominous sign that the show is about to jump the shark. The overseas episodes tend to present the same tired formula in a new location, as parodied by Ricky Gervais in Extras. It’s Always Sunny managed to go the other way. When the Gang went to Ireland, it grounded the show and paved the way for some of the most emotionally engaging moments in Sunny’s history.
Shot on location (but still featuring some shaky greenscreen footage, presumably from reshoots), season 15’s four-part Irish adventure works beautifully. The initial setup in “The Gang Goes to Ireland” is that Dee has an acting gig in Dublin, but the storyline takes an unexpectedly dramatic turn when Charlie tracks down his long-time pen pal and learns that it’s his biological father, Shelley Kelly, played spectacularly by Colm Meaney. Throughout the series, Charlie’s absentee father has been a running gag, but season 15’s Shelley Kelly storyline digs deep into the psychological toll of childhood abandonment.
Despite the emotional tone of the Irish episodes, the back end of the season doesn’t get too bogged down in the drama. There’s plenty of absurdity involving the rest of the Gang to offset the tragedies faced by Charlie. Dennis is more psychotic than ever – babbling about the smell of red hair, conversing with a haunted castle, coming at Dee with an axe, and cutting out the eye-holes of a framed portrait so he can spy on people from behind it – while Frank disposes of files tying him to Jeffrey Epstein any way he can (including dumping them in the kegs at a pub).
In the finale episode, “The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain,” Charlie recruits his friends to help him get his dad’s corpse to the top of a mountain for a bizarre Irish burial ritual. The writers wring plenty of laughs out of that ludicrous premise, like Dennis dangling from the corpse to protect his Vitruvian back, but the episode takes a heartbreaking turn when everybody else abandons Charlie and he’s forced to carry the corpse alone in the pouring rain. After finally giving up, he breaks down next to the body and tells the father who abandoned him, “You weren’t there! And I needed you!” Sunny fans never expected this show to make them cry (much less sob uncontrollably), but the combination of Charlie Day’s truly powerful performance and the solemn bagpipe cover of “Amazing Grace” made the season 15 finale a real tearjerker.
