One of the reasons why It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been on the air for 13 seasons and yet still manages to remain fresh and exciting is that it’s constantly evolving. The first couple of seasons were described as “Seinfeld on crack,” but the more recent seasons have become meta and self-aware, playing on the audience’s expectations of the characters and subverting them.
A show that shakes itself up every couple of years needs to have strong season premiere episodes to reintroduce audiences to its curious, ever-changing world. So, here is Every It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season Premiere, Ranked.
Season 1: “The Gang Gets Racist”
The very first episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia almost seems like it’s from a completely different show. The characters are all completely different: Dennis is the voice of reason, Dee doesn’t have any funny lines, Charlie and Mac have no psychological damage. “The Gang Gets Racist” doesn’t have a particularly groundbreaking premise, either.
Charlie uses a racial slur when quoting someone and the Waitress hears it out of context and calls him “Hitler.” The Gang spends the rest of the episode trying to prove that they’re not racist. It’s nowhere near as smart as the show would go on to become.
Season 2: “Charlie Gets Crippled”
A lot of early-season Always Sunny episodes would take a social issue – like, say, disability – and simply depict it without commenting on it or satirizing it. And so goes the season 2 premiere, in which Charlie is bummed out that he gets no attention from strippers, gets hit by a car, and is confined to a wheelchair for a few weeks.
Charlie starts acting like a bitter Vietnam vet, but it doesn’t get him any more attention from the strippers, so there’s no plot progression. There are some dark laughs wrung out of Mac getting the idea to cruise around in a wheelchair and pretend to be disabled, but it’s not enough to save the episode.
Season 12: “The Gang Turns Black”
This episode makes for pretty uncomfortable viewing. It’s a body-swap premise in which the Gang wakes up to find themselves in African-American bodies. Over the course of the episode, Mac and Dennis get arrested, Frank dances around his desire to say the N-word, and Charlie gets shot by a cop.
The sight of a black child getting murdered by a police officer (even if it is supposed to be Charlie on the inside) is too harrowing to be funny. On the whole, the episode’s message is strong – that racism is a serious issue in America – but it’s also an obvious one; anyone who watches the news can see that.
Season 3: “The Gang Finds a Dumpster Baby”
Despite being three seasons in, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia still hadn’t quite found its feet by the time it gave us “The Gang Finds a Dumpster Baby.” Still, it’s not a bad episode – it’s just that the show reached greater heights in the years that followed.
It has a pretty good premise: when the Gang finds a dumpster baby, Mac and Dee try to get it modeling work; meanwhile, Dennis cons some environmentalists and Charlie and Frank become obsessed with trash and eventually move into a dumpster themselves. It has some of Sunny’s darkest early moments, like Mac and Dee trying to get the baby in a tanning bed to change its race and make it more sellable in the ad market, but the show would eventually go on to top itself.
Season 11: “Chardee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo”
There have been a number of sequel episodes in It’s Always Sunny history, including “Gun Fever Too: Still Hot” and “McPoyle vs. Ponderosa: The Trial of the Century,” and by those standards, “Chardee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo” holds up. It’s an extension of the initial “Chardee MacDennis” storyline, with new rules added to the game and extra plot twists this time around.
However, by regular-episode standards, sequel episodes generally seem lazy, like they’re just rehashing a previous idea that hit with audiences. So, it’s kind of a double-edged sword: it’s great to see the Gang’s board game again, but there’s also a feeling of déjà vu.
Season 8: “Pop-Pop: The Final Solution”
In the season 8 premiere, Dennis and Dee are faced with the decision to euthanize their Nazi grandfather, while Mac and Charlie attempt to track down an old dog painting that might be a Hitler original.
Mac demonstrates his inability to follow the plots of movies as he tries to mount his own biopic with Ryan Gosling playing him and finds himself confused by the contrived twists in his own life. The episode isn’t narratively perfect – Dennis and Dee’s A-plot meanders, while Mac and Charlie’s B-plot has one twist too many – but it is a funny installment of the show.
Season 4: “Mac and Dennis: Manhunters”
By the fourth season, the writers of It’s Always Sunny finally worked out how to make Danny DeVito work in the show’s cast. Instead of making him a soft father figure for the Gang, they decided that he would be even weirder, more horrible, and more depraved than any of the others.
In the season 4 premiere, Frank is involved in both storylines. He tells Charlie and Dee that the meat they stole from him was human meat, so they begin to have cannibalistic cravings, and he tries to teach Mac and Dennis the lesson that they shouldn’t hunt humans as they go after Cricket in tactical gear.
Season 9: “The Gang Broke Dee”
The ninth season of It’s Always Sunny began by building Dee up for the first time ever and then sending her crashing down worse than ever before. At first, it seems as though she’s finally becoming a successful comedian as she lands gigs at local comedy clubs, gets picked up by an agent, and is supposedly booked for an appearance on Conan.
But then it turns out that it was all an elaborate prank by the Gang to show Dee that it was possible for her to sink ever lower. It was cruel and shocking and utterly hilarious – in other words, classic Sunny!
Season 6: “Mac Fights Gay Marriage”
Although its use of terms like “tranny” has dated the episode terribly, season 6 of It’s Always Sunny kicks off with an excellent installment that shows all of the characters in fine form.
Dennis jumps into a marriage that he instantly regrets, Dee starts having an affair with a married man, Charlie and Frank decide to get a civil partnership for the legal perks, and Mac exercises his devout religiousness and closeted homosexuality for one of the first times in his multi-season character arc. The episode doesn’t properly conclude, but that’s only because the second episode of the season acts as its second part.
Season 13: “The Gang Makes Paddy’s Great Again”
The meta episodes of It’s Always Sunny are often a lot of fun. This is certainly the case for the season 13 premiere, “The Gang Makes Paddy’s Great Again,” in which the Gang tries to figure out how to keep going in an increasingly sensitive world. They bring in a new star who is popular with liberals, Mindy Kaling, to take Dennis’ place and shake things up.
Things with Kaling go successfully, but the Gang just can’t move on from Dennis – even going as far as getting a sex doll made with his likeness to replace him. It was a great way to reintroduce It’s Always Sunny in both a post-Dennis world and politicially correct world.
Season 5: “The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis”
For a truly great sitcom episode to work, both the A-plot and the B-plot have to pop. If one is strong and the other is phoned-in just to fill the two-story quota, the episode won’t be a classic. The season 5 premiere “The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis” is an example of an episode where both plotlines work.
The guys fight the Lawyer over ownership of a recession-era house they want to flip, while Dee tries to convince a couple who are struggling to conceive to hire her as their surrogate. At the end, the two storylines converge in the couple’s pool.
Season 7: “Frank’s Pretty Woman”
Everyone has something hilarious going on in this episode, which is what makes it classic Sunny.
Frank wants to marry a prostitute, Charlie tries to get him to have more respect for himself (even if this does end in him vomiting fake blood all over a woman in the back of a limo), Mac shows off his season 7 weight gain, Dennis tries to teach him the virtues of starving yourself and ends up being wooed by Mac’s new lifestyle, and Dee finds that the prostitute life is more glamorous than she thought and considers a career as a “foot girl.”
Season 10: “The Gang Beats Boggs”
What a great way to kick off a season of It’s Always Sunny. It has a devilishly simplistic premise – the Gang attempts to break the beer-drinking record set by baseball legend Wade Boggs on a cross-country flight – that gives every character a chance to shine.
From Frank giving himself alcohol poisoning to Dennis getting involved with a clingy Midwesterner to Mac being “the Bud Selig,” there’s at least one fun side-plot involving everyone in the main cast in this episode. The premise was so juicy that this was also the episode chosen for an all-female reboot in season 13 (and that was a great episode, too).
