It’s Rarely So Sunny in Philadelphia

Reflections on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Catholicism.

I’ve been in a lot of conversations recently where religion comes up. It’s not usually the first topic, but it comes somewhere about an hour in after other ground has been covered. I can tell it’s asked with genuine curiosity – not as a test, but more as a ‘Wait, what are you?’ kind of question.

I usually answer;

“Oh, I was raised Catholic,” or “I’m technically Catholic.” When I’ve been pressed further, I’ve fallen into a phrase – a phrase that hasn’t consciously meant anything to me, over the years I’ve said it,

“I guess, well, I’m culturally Catholic.”

I’ve rattled off lists, trying to justify what I mean by that, with

“Oh, I don’t know… The stained glass! El Greco! Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve!”

But one of the most Catholic influences in my recent life hasn’t been mass or stained glass. It’s been from a strange source: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Over the last month, I have been making my way methodically through the show, after years of being behind the crowd and only knowing a few of the famous episodes and the most noteworthy memes. The show, for those of you who haven’t watched, has the surface of a 90s Friends-style sitcom: the five main characters largely stay rooted in the same space (a dingy dive bar in Philadelphia), and their world doesn’t expand much beyond the surrounding city, if at all.

Considering that the gang owns an Irish bar in working-class Philly (and most of them are, vaguely, Irish-American), Catholicism finds its way into the show. Take, for example, this: It’s the second season. The Gang (Dee, Charlie, Dennis, Mac, and Frank) discover a water stain in the back office of their bar that looks oddly like the Virgin Mary. Mac, being the most Catholic of the bunch, believes it to be a sign. Frank sees the real potential of the stain: profit. The gang opens the bar to the people of Philadelphia and asks for donations from the visitors. When the coffers don’t magically fill up, The Gang decides to get Dee to reach out to Father Matthew Mara, a priest at a nearby church who was a former classmate of Dee’s (both Dee and Mara, coincidentally, were bullied relentlessly in school by the rest of the gang). The aim is to get the Church to bless the stain and make the ruse official.

What follows is classic It’s Always Sunny: Dee meets with Father Mara at the confessional and waxes poetic about her love for him, while Dennis and Frank find an alcoholic washed-up former priest to bless the bar instead. After finally convincing the washed-up priest to bless the bar (bribing him with booze), the old man walks up to the stain and pees on it. Just like that, kaput, there goes the Virgin Mary. Dee returns from trying to plead to Father Mara for the blessing, and a split moment later Father Mara walks through the door dressed in his civilian clothes. He’s given up the cloth to pursue his love for Dee. But since the ruse no longer matters, she balks. She discards him, and what follows is a series-long slow-motion tragedy in Father Mara’s life. He loses the priesthood, falls into addiction, and then turns to a life of homelessness, prostitution, and petty crime. When’s he on the verge of receiving an apology from the gang, later in the show, he has half of his face burned in an apartment fire caused by the gang at Thanksgiving.

It gets worse, somehow, for Rickety-Cricket (Mara’s unfortunate nickname). His parade of miseries, for example, leads him to mistakenly make out with a golden retriever.

This should nail in a certain point: By every metric the gang is awful, and unworthy of really anything like sympathy, or respect. The five characters form a kind of moral blackhole in their world. When others on their periphery accidentally or purposefully slip into their orbit, The Gang finds a way to make their lives worse. The protagonists are comically awful people. Their awfulness is the point: you don’t have to feel too bad about laughing at them when they flail (which they do, often). They exist, fundamentally, as punching bags; always there for us to wail at as an audience. Doesn’t it feel good to punch down at the end of the long day, and watch a show where the characters feel hopelessly lost?

When the characters seem to be on the verge of some sort of breakthrough, they always find their way back to failing, and self-annihilation. There’s something existentially reassuring about that setup: nothing changes. The Gang will always be The Gang. The boys and Dee will always be at the bar in Philadelphia, drinking and yelling, Charlie Kelly will always be doing Charlie-work, Dennis will always say the most sociopathic thing possible, Dee will… always be called a bird.

And you can always sit down on the couch, turn on IASIP, and laugh at the gang and the new ways they find to self-destruct. There’s no need to worry about anything changing: the formula works.

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Another thing that I have been saying;

“I like the tradition in the Church! It doesn’t change much over time.” When you step into mass, you know what you’re getting into. It might be 2023, but you’re feeling the same yawn-inducing boredom that a 15th-century French peasant once felt.

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There’s a hint of something real and complicated lurking beneath the comedy throughout, however. Over the course of 16 seasons, The Gang’s interior lives begin to unfurl. There’s Dee, the failed actor who seemed just on the verge of making it big (until, that is, The Gang roped her into buying the bar). She’s one of the first characters that gets a shot at a quasi-redemption arc, which ends in one of the most vicious and brutal episodes of It’s Always Sunny (it was so bad, and so cruel, that when I watched it for the first time I had to step away and take a few days off of IASIP).

There’s Charlie, with his not-so-subtle trauma regarding sexual abuse as a kid. His first attempts at dealing with it are in Season 4, with his rock opera The Nightman Cometh (legitimately one of my favorite episodes of television, ever). Despite the immediately apparent innuendos in the musical (such as when Frank keeps mispronouncing soul, leading him to say; “You’ve gotta’ pay the troll toll, if you want to get into that boy’s hole”), the joke is on Charlie. He has no idea what he’s writing about: his only clear intention is finally landing ‘the waitress’, the woman he’s pined over throughout the whole show. The schtick doesn’t work: the waitress walks out, and he’s left empty, all the work for nothing, and no closer to self-acceptance.Another undercurrent through the show is Mac’s sexuality. Even though he’s the most devoutly religious and Catholic of the bunch, the running gag throughout is that Mac is gay. As the show goes on, the Freudian slips get more Freudian, and the subtext loses its subtlety. But of everyone in the gang, Mac is probably the first to take a major step in accepting who he is. He comes out to The Gang, and it’s so banal, so forgettable, that I nearly forgot it happened (even though I watched this just a week ago). While The Gang is supportive and continues the ‘we know’ schtick throughout his coming out, that begins to dissipate as the truth of it dawns on them. What begins is the road to acceptance, with slight apprehension from everyone. Now that Mac is officially out of the closet, there’s no more joke, or not in the same way at least. All he is being now is himself — a stunted, repressed version of himself trying to push past his baggage, but still, a radically more true-to-Mac version of the character than we have ever seen in the show.

The force of the change is sudden, and it’s pretty apparent right away that it disrupts the whole tenor and course of the show. It’s as if there’s a facade in the show, and a crack emerging that threatens to break everything.

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Two of the most plot-breaking, show-upsetting moments in the later seasons happen in the rain.

With season 15, The Gang is temporarily ripped from Philadelphia after Dee gets a sudden role for a movie filming in Dublin. The gang trades in Dee’s first-class ticket for 5 coach tickets (don’t question the logic!!), and after a bender at Paddy’s in Philadelphia Dee wakes up at a ‘Patty’s Pub’ in Dublin, only shortly before she’s supposed to be on set. What follows is classic IASIP: Dee is hit by a taxi, and a giant welt on her face takes her out of commission for the role, and she is instead cast for an abused wife role (of which she misses the filming entirely). In Dee’s arc, the show holds steady: there’s no reprieve for her because she’s fundamentally selfish and greedy in her pursuits. She hasn’t earned redemption yet.

But Ireland, really, becomes about Charlie. In a hunt for his former Irish ‘pen-pal’, who he used to write to as a child in accidentally fluent Gaelic, he discovers that the pen-pal was actually his estranged biological father all along. Charlie begins to make up for lost time: they drink at the pub together, sing together, and talk through all of the Kelly family history together. There’s a hint that this could be the world, and the life, that Charlie belongs in, and has always belonged in. His character senses that, too: Charlie is happier and more content in these episodes than at any other point in all of IASIP. To the show, however, that’s a threat. The Gang, from different angles, tries to disrupt it (Frank, stewing in jealousy after being replaced as Charlie’s quasi-father-figure, invites the two of them over and tries to get Charlie’s father to eat soup that is, literally, a bowl of shit). But it’s Dennis who ends the threat, unwittingly. Clearly sick with Covid the whole trip (which he refuses to acknowledge), Dennis gives it accidentally to Charlie’s father, who ends up dying. In supposed ‘Kelly’ tradition, Charlie is told to trek to the top of a cliff in the Irish countryside to haul his father’s body off the mountain and into the ocean. But as he lashes out at the gang for what they’ve done, forcing them to leave him alone, he struggles to haul the body bag up the cliff alone. And then a large rainstorm comes. He struggles in the mud and the wind. The rain is so heavy that Charlie is literally sinking into the land, sinking into Ireland. As bagpipes play Amazing Grace in the background, he finally implodes. Charlie screams and cries as he mourns his father and this fate that he was saddled with: to carry his father’s body while his dad, in his own life, had never been there for Charlie.

Just when the moment is the ripest and the direst, a blaring American pickup truck revs through the fog and the wind with the rest of The Gang all onboard. America, to the rescue! No more Ireland, no more old-world struggles, no more dread, no more God, only a beast of a truck and American know-how magically erasing all struggle, all history, and pulling Charlie Kelly away from the existential dread and back into the cycle of rinse-and-repeat.

They haul the body and fling it over the cliff. It misses the ocean, and instead thuds on the rocks.

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That’s one answer to the struggle for belonging and flourishing. It’s quintessentially American: you drive through problems, over the mud and the heather. You don’t wallow, or even sit with uncomfortable thoughts: you rev the proverbial F-150 in your mind and race past anything that could hold you back. History is a roadblock in American culture, something to be overcome, and its only value is tied to how we use it to mold the future. But then, of course, we are supposed to discard it and move on.

But there’s a second solution that the show presents, two seasons earlier in Season 13. In Season 13, Episode 10, Mac is struggling to ‘feel’ his pride, now that he’s out of the closet. Frank recognizes that Mac won’t be able to move on until he comes out to his father, who is imprisoned. Mac has an elaborate vision of how he could describe his sexuality perfectly to his distant father: an angel, the light of God, etc. We’re all supposed to laugh at this: it’s presented as absurd, and Frank and the rest of the gang react similarly when they hear of it. It’s only in the last six or so minutes of the last episode of Season 13 that we begin to sense what Mac means. The scene begins in a jail auditorium, where the inmates have sat down in rows of metal chairs. Mac comes out on a stage above the audience. He stands, holds his hands together, and tells his father what he’s been meaning to say: “I’m gay.” And then the lights go out. Thunder roars. A single spotlight blares on the stage, and there’s Mac with a dancing partner (a woman wearing a flowing white dress, an angel). Pumped-in water trickles from the ceiling as rain. They begin to dance, sliding across the floor in the puddles that the water has made. Mac dances shirtless, in his jeans as the rain comes down. It’s immaculate and exquisite choreography. As the music stops, he spins onto the floor and looks at his father, waiting for some sign of approval. But his father stands up and walks out. The camera pans across the audience. The thunder claps again. The music restarts as the dancer takes Mac’s hand and leads him back into the dance. He holds onto her, spinning across the stage, dragging her arm as they slide across the watery stage and further away from each other. They run across from either end of the stage and embrace, and spin together furiously. The music slowly fades. All we can hear is a heartbeat. Mac slowly melts into her arms, buries his head into her chest. She comforts him, and gets closer, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she whispers to him as the rain continues softly from the ceiling. And then. Boom. A spotlight clicks. A beam of light comes from above and bathes them in light. The angel looks up at the light, and Bach’s Air on G String plays as she holds Mac in her arms and looks up as the choir sings. The camera zooms into Frank, sitting in the audience, and his eyes widen as he says,

“Oh my God. I get it.”

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Much of the heart behind Catholicism, or maybe any faith, is that life is made meaningful by repetition. You stand up at “Let us pray”, and then you sit, and kneel, and bow your head, and then do it again, and then chew on the thin wafer at hundreds of different communions and pray the rosary as the beads slip through your fingers thousands of times. You say so many Hail Mary’s, and pray for all your life, because you believe that someday those prayers will be answered, or at least listened to (or because you were forced into the pew that morning by a visiting great-aunt, and you need to maintain the appearances of still being a good Catholic).

The ritualism doesn’t end in the cathedral: it follows you everywhere, at home, at work, in all of the things you do, in the things you say and the stories you tell about yourself, and the expectations that you hold for life itself. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia isn’t immune to that. It is fundamentally a spiritually Catholic show, even as it tries to escape it, which probably makes it even more Catholic. One of its rituals is in how the characters fail — fail to make the most of themselves, and continuously hurt others and themselves in the process. The hurt and the anguish are repeated, ad nauseam, at slightly different cadences, with different settings and jokes propelling it. But the fundamental joke (their lives) is cyclical. Because of that, it appears to be a replaying loop of a circle of people who are in some deep layer of hell, where there’s no way out.

But Mac, at least, tries something different. He channels the force of his life into something radical. He not only makes art, but makes himself art, and transforms his life into something that not only tells his Father what he’s always wanted to say but stuns the audience and opens a whole world for Frank. The dancing itself is a new kind of repetition: the repetition of art, of quiet off-screen practice, of repeated steps and moves and twirls that become much more than a sum of its individual parts. And then, by the end of the dance, when Mac is emptied of everything and seemingly lost, that’s when the light comes in. And it’s only fair that it’s Bach that plays — Bach, a composer known for using repetition across his music as a way to build comfortable familiarity and then to tear or subvert it when the trance needs to be broken.And what else is there to say about this show? It will try to get back into its rhythms, its rituals of jokes and punching-down and failures, but it won’t quite land in the way it used to. The writers broke the show. And we should be glad. As the big guy said, in Genesis,

‘Let there be light. And there was light.” And there was light here, and a glimpse of what life could be. If only we let the light in, in whatever way that looks for us. And it could be good. So good.