By Jeff Bell

Philly EDGE Correspondent

 

“A bunch of jerks working at a bar in Philly.”

If that strikes you as a simplistic and decidedly sanitized description of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you’re not alone.

The show’s creator, Rob McElhenney, may have coughed up that high-concept encapsulation for the series’ press kit, but he admits that it doesn’t do his twisted sitcom the injustice it deserves.

“It’s difficult when people ask me to describe the show,” says the 30-year-old native of South Philly and Delaware County. “It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Well, we got stranded on an island and it’s all about us trying to get off the island.’ There IS no ‘concept.’ It’s like ‘a bunch of dickheads that run a bar in Philly,’ and that doesn’t necessarily sound so appealing. It’s hard unless you actually show it to somebody.”

How’s this for a description: a bunch of pathologically self-absorbed dickheads who run a bar in Philly while embracing crack, steroids, welfare fraud, political graft, abortion and Jihadism.

Sunny is the perfect comic valentine for a city with a soaring murder rate and a killer wage tax—even the lush, lilting theme music that plays over its opening credits is corrosively ironic. And disciples of this cult hit will be happy to hear that the blackest sun on basic cable continues to shine as darkly as ever in the two-episode third-season premiere – Thurs. Sept. 13 at 10 p.m. on FX – when the gang at Paddy’s Irish Pub attempts to exploit a baby found in a dumpster for financial gain before pummeling each other during Invincible-style tryouts for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Yes, these kids are most certainly NOT all right—and McElhenney wouldn’t have it any other way.

Since debuting two years ago, Sunny has become McElhenney’s delivery from Hollywood’s demimonde of doomed-to-obscurity bit players. This year, FX gave the show an order of 15 episodes. That was eight more than its dangerously malnourished first season and five more than last year, when Danny DeVito joined the cast as the pint-sized pappy to twins Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson)…and perhaps even Charlie (Charlie Day), as we learned in the season finale.

Does that sign of network support give the cast a reason to collectively unclench?

“We’re relaxed no matter what,” insists McElhenney, who plays Mac. “We just don’t think about it. We sort of hope for the best but expect the worst in a lot of ways.”

It’s an understandable response: He’s had many more career lows than highs. In fact, the show was developed out of McElhenney’s extreme pessimism. He wrote the pilot—then titled “It’s Always Sunny on TV”—as a creative exercise three years ago when he’d hit a professional nadir. He shot it for $200 with fellow struggling actors Howerton and Day not long after he’d moved to Los Angeles from New York City. By that time, he’d endured eight years of TV guest shots and film roles that went nowhere.

“I was working at a restaurant and living in a garage in the back of somebody else’s house. I was barely able to even afford that, and I was behind on my credit card and car payments. I was going seriously into debt and working at a restaurant five nights a week. I had just had enough, and things were not working.”

The guys showed their pilot and a follow-up episode to their management firm, which shopped it around. FX, the boutique house behind such edgy fare as The Shield and Rescue Me, acquired the property—after agreeing to the provision that McElhenney and his crew retain creative control and co-starring credits. Olson and her self-esteem-challenged character came on-board later.

It’s a clean, simple and pretty boring success story—but one that McElhenney has probably earned, considering some of the disappointments he’d endured prior to his reversal of misfortune.

His biggest letdown came not long after he graduated from St. Joe’s Prep in 1995 and moved to New York City to become an actor. The son of a social worker and a nurse, he’d recently reconnected with a childhood love of performing after taking a role in a girls’ school production (he’d done it to meet the girls).

His breakthrough role: a supporting part in the 1997 thriller The Devil’s Own, which co-starred two reasonably successful guys named Ford and Pitt.

“The character was a 19-year-old Irish kid with long hair and earrings. I happened to be a 19-year-old Irish kid with long hair and earrings…so I got the gig. I had a scene with Brad Pitt, a scene with Harrison Ford and a scene with this girl who I’d never heard of: Julia Stiles. I played her boyfriend. I did that job [and] thought, ‘This is great; it’s only going to go up from here.’

“And then I didn’t work for another six months. Then the movie came out, and I got cut out of it. I learned a couple of very important lessons—not to rest on my laurels, and not to expect anything until I see it up on the screen.”

But as he prepares to edit the second half of this season’s episodes, the executive producer/writer/director of Sunny sounds merely beat, not bitter.

And why should he be?

After all, his show’s hip cachet even got him cast last season on an episode of Lost (you know, that show about people stranded on an island). And to hear him tell it, he’s now doing precisely what he should be doing.

“I feel like one of my strengths is coming up with ideas, writing scripts and things like that,” he says. “I’m the quote-unquote ‘show runner,’ which means I’m sort of leading the charge with the network…talking with the executives, running the writer’s room. Those are things that I think I’m pretty good at.”

That attitude could explain why McElhenney’s Mac, a low-rent lothario, often hangs in the background while the other characters—particularly Day’s hyper-caffeinated Charlie and Howerton’s Main Line douchebag Dennis—deliver the big laughs.

“I’m not a comedic actor of their caliber,” he demurs. “I have my own mantra: If we’re cutting a scene and it’s not going so well, cut to Charlie or Glenn. The two of them—[and] Kaitlin [and] Danny—they’re just fuckin’ funny, so I think that just comes through.”

McElhenney’s also generous with the laughs where Philly talent is concerned—namely, the cast of WMMR’s The Preston and Steve Show, whom he befriended when he first began promoting Sunny. Producers Nick McIlwain and Casey Foster return this season in small roles, and news/traffic reporter Kathy Romano cameos for the first time as a concerned parent in the episode, “Dennis Looks Like a Sex Offender.”

With titles like that, does McElhenney ever expect a lambasting from Rupert Murdoch, FX’s arch-conservative owner and the force behind Fox News Channel?

“If I thought that Rupert Murdoch had ever heard of the show, I would think so,” he says. “But I think he’s too busy running the world.”

Just as long as Rupe stays out of Paddy’s Irish Pub.

 

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