Mac Goes Back to Being ‘Straight’ in Tonight’s New ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’
Ronald “Mac” McDonald decided to live his truth as an openly gay man in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode “Hero or Hate Crime?”, but that was before half of America decided that they actually like hate crimes.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been on the air so long that it’s almost old enough to binge drink, and in their 20 years on television, the Paddy’s Pub Gang has had to parse through numerous dramatic culture shifts due to the political climate. Given that these are the same people who, if they were alive during the Revolutionary War, would have sided with the British against the Founding Fathers, The Gang usually gets the cultural moment completely wrong and ends up on the dumber side of history. However, when it comes to the far-right turn America has recently taken on social issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, for once, The Gang has tried to make their own worldview more ignorant and intolerant to fit the zeitgeist.
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In tonight’s new Always Sunny episode, “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time,” Mac, Dennis, Charlie and Dee attempt to reinvent themselves in order to appear more palatable to the viewers of The Golden Bachelor. In an attempt to appeal to “the flyover states,” Mac decided to play it straight for a change by restyling himself in the fashion of the most masculine and heterosexual superstar of all time: Freddie Mercury.
Naturally, because Mac’s perception of gender and sexuality is as warped, bizarre and off-base as Charlie’s relationship with the written word, Straight Mac is somehow the gayest version of Mac that we’ve ever seen on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even Mac’s line declaring himself to be straight, “I love Jesus, and, therefore, am not gay,” reeks of the long-repressed homosexuality that Always Sunny fans know to live within him. From the tank tops to the mustaches to the leather to the obsession with talking about his and Dennis’ living situation, the test audiences whom Dennis desperately wanted to please ironically saw Mac for his true self: a gay vampire hunter who definitely cannot do a backflip.
And while Dennis repeatedly tried and failed to ingratiate himself to the Middle-American test audience, Mac, with all his overtly homosexual bad-boy energy, consistently earned the highest audience score of anyone in the bizarre, staged test-screening of a reality TV show episode that will never air. Maybe, against all odds and in spite of Mac’s rebrand, the mass-appeal audience of Middle America is ready to embrace a gay couple like Mac and Dennis — once Mac is done grooming Dennis, of course.
