‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Says That America Has Moved Past Comedy

In 2025, America’s TV-watchers aren’t interested in comedy that might make them aware of their own condition. Perhaps they’d prefer to escape from their reality in the comfortable neon glow of Suds instead.

Tonight’s new episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “The Gang Gets Ready for Primetime,” featured Dennis, Mac, Charlie and Dee preparing for their appearance on The Golden Bachelor by subjecting themselves to round after round of live test screenings to figure out which version of themselves will be most palatable to middle-American network television viewers. Spoilers ahead for anyone who couldn’t guess the answer, but, naturally, there’s no flattering angle for The Gang that will make the devil-fearing, backflip-loving masses less scared and put-off by their antics because, let’s face it, the target audience for phony, feel-good, heavily-scripted “reality” television probably doesn’t laugh at burn victims becoming boy pimps and accidental rape scenes in community theater productions.

While prepping The Gang for his test-screening scheme at the top of the episode, Dennis dissuades Dee from trying to turn the opportunity into a platform for her cringey comedy, telling the group, “We’ve moved past comedy as a society. We don’t want it anymore, we’ve decided. You know, it makes us think too much about our current condition, and, really, we don’t want to think about ourselves because it makes us feel bad about ourselves, and then we project onto the people who are making us think, and then we cancel ‘em.”

I guess that’s one way to explain why Lethal Weapon 5 isn’t in the Philadelphia public library anymore.

“This is bigger than looking good, the most important thing is to not look bad,” Dennis implores his friends in the first act of “The Gang Gets Ready for Primetime,” telling them that they will submit themselves to the test audience’s scoring over and over again “until finally we land on the most perfect versions of ourselves that will appear to the wildest possible audiences and offend no one. That is how you make great art!”

Throughout “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time,” the entire cast of Always Sunny desperately tries to reshape themselves into the mold of a heterosexual, non-Satanic, non-traditional but entirely normal sort-of-family unit that can earn a passing grade in likability from the test audience. But, for all The Gang’s total physical and spiritual transformations, the normies who somehow spent a month crowding around the Gang’s staged dinner scene in Dennis and Mac’s apartment only ever respond to Dee’s terrible prop humor and exciting stunts that Mac can’t quite pull off.

In a metatextual sense, “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time” is about how It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will never be able to convince Middle America to watch and enjoy the show, but, more than that, it’s about how Hollywood’s obsession with pleasing the largest possible audience has led to a consistent output of bland, boring, focus-grouped slop comedy that’s entirely indistinguishable from any other high-testing option on the market.

At the end of the episode, The Gang concludes that there’s no point in changing themselves to appeal to a wide audience, because they’ll never be able to make everyone like them. Plus, from a purely practical standpoint, there was never any point to Dennis’ focus-group scheme in the first place, since Frank never intended for any of them to appear on The Golden Bachelor — he hired actors to do the family visit episode without telling his real family.

Or, as Mac would put it, Frank went woke, and he didn’t go broke.