Review: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time" | Season 17, Episode 7

"Trust me, guys. This is exactly what America wants."

I admit that I was not thrilled about the looming specter of a second crossover this season. At least not this crossover. I have nothing against reality TV. Okay, I lied—I have historically dismissed reality television as bread and circuses nonsense, even before the genre helped install a rapey fascist in the White House. Twice.

I’m sure good people watch The Golden Bachelor, a late-life group dating spectacle which, in the It’s Always Sunny universe, has chosen Frank freaking Reynolds to be its newest titular contestant. So power to you, mainstream America—try not to turn the next big winner into a Hitlerian freakshow.

But as a plot device for Sunny, this conceit filled me with the dread you get when a show you admire appears to be making a huge miscalculation. Yet here’s where I admit something else—“The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time” sort of kills it, mainly by keeping the garish cross-pollination to a minimum in favor of another round of Dee, Mac, Charlie, and Dennis unwittingly revealing the depth and breadth of their multifarious madnesses. It comes with a generous side dish of metatextual deconstruction of the series’ mainstream appeal—or lack thereof.

It’s Always Sunny has gone meta before, and most ably. “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award” skewered that same mainstream’s perennial slighting of one of the smartest and most challengingly funny shows in TV history, capping off the Gang’s disastrously madcap attempts to appeal to the widest possible audience with an inhalant-addled Charlie crooning his defiantly improvised, spider-infested, spittle-flinging piano ballad, “Go Fuck Yourselves.”

Here, Frank’s planned hometown visit for a televised sit-down dinner with his family and friends is the impetus not just for another predictably dire group effort to appear normal, but also for some further cheeky swipes at a viewership that continues to snub them. (Season 17’s ratings have been even lower than usual, apparently.) Here it’s Dennis who’s most invested in the Gang coming off well on TV, his pitch to the others practically reaching out through the screen and shaking a largely indifferent America by the lapels.

“We need to be the most perfect versions of ourselves that will appeal to the widest possible audiences and will offend no one. That’s how you make great art,” is Dennis’ view, harkening back to that previous meta-ep’s depiction of the perfect cross-Philly watering hole, a neon-bright hangout spot complete with fruity drinks and a quipping, will-they/won’t they couple behind the bar. Paddy’s is not that place, and the Gang is not going to appeal to Mac’s ideal “middle America” audience. (Who will in his estimation love a Mac-forward macho adventure where he threatened a stray coyote with eye violence.)

Dennis also name-checks the aforementioned reality show despot without mentioning his name, while noting confidently, “We’ve moved past comedy as a society.” As he rebuts the others’ similarly Gang-fronted TV plans, “[Comedy] makes us think too much about our current condition. And then we don’t want to think about ourselves because it makes us feel bad about ourselves, so then we project out onto the people that are making us think and we… cancel ‘em.” Mac leaps in to label Dennis’ philosophy as “go woke, go broke,” something he no doubt gleaned from being a sponge for ubiquitous right-wing bullshit, and while Dennis calls his thought the exact opposite of that, his attempts to shepherd the Gang through a heavily focus-grouped series of “normal family dinner” rehearsals only serves to muddy things up. Hilariously.

There’s a danger that these sort of satirical broadsides could come off as smug, or preachy. Or worse, not funny. But Sunny is funny, and if any show has earned the right to slap viewers in the kisser with a little tough love, it’s this one. Sunny’s writers and performers (this episode’s credited to Charlie Day, David Hornsby, and Rob Chernin) routinely spelunk right into the deep, dark, fetid heart of America and emerge clutching nuggets of pure, radioactive comedy gold, doing exactly what Dennis rightly claims the vast majority of the viewing public does not want to see. At its best, It’s Always Sunny confronts us with our most shameful, dingy, and self-serving shit, ratings be damned.

In practice, “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time” is organized around Dennis’ desperate need to craft a starring vehicle where he is the perennially youthful, charismatic, capable, and “normal” protagonist. That the others all have their own squirmy need to take on starring roles suited to their individual, contradictory heroes’ journeys naturally leads to some tightly controlled chaos. Prepping for Frank’s imminent arrival with a TV crew and some deeply unsuspecting mature would-be life partner by inviting a focus group moderator and a gaggle of off-the-street audience members into Mac and Dennis’ apartment only amplifies those cross-currents of needy neuroses through a trio of escalating dinner disasters.

Dee wants to “pop,” mainly by bringing out her best “Chinaman” comedy material. Mac has decided that the flyover states won’t cotton to his gayness, so back in the bad boy closet he goes. (His evolving macho costuming turns him unwittingly into Freddie Mercury.) As for Charlie, perhaps the least ego-driven of the bunch, a typical misunderstanding sees him mixing up Dennis’ boxful of unguents and Nair-ing all his hair off. (My wig-dar is notoriously wonky, but damned if it doesn’t appear that Charlie Day denuded his entire head and face in a McElhenney-worthy feat of body modification.)

After the first focus group hands down a 22 score (“out of the number 100!” Dennis rails at Dee), largely due to a host of off-putting creative deviations from Dennis’ meticulously bland script, Dennis demands serious course correction. Some notes: Charlie shouldn’t wheel out two volleyball-mop effigies of Frank and his date (while claiming the woman is “a slut who likes to shove things in her mouth”); Dee needs to cool it with the ethnic jokes; and Mac needs to stop presenting himself as a spray-tanned, Jesus-loving, resolutely straight farmer. That it’s Dennis whose bossy, sweaty domineering scored worst of the four is beside Dennis’ point that, if the Gang would just present themselves as his compliant supporting cast, this cross-section of average viewers would give them the validation he so desperately desires.

Each successive focus group attempt is a little masterpiece of adaptive pandering. Dee’s transformation into a “family friendly” comic, complete with baggy suit jacket, rubber chicken, and actual sad trombone vies with the emboldened Mac doubling down on his macho role (even a catastrophic backflip attempt gets applause). And Charlie, now sporting a bad wig and Borat accent, gets his laughs too, all to the increasingly frustrated Dennis’ flailing fury. (Taking the first group’s assertion that he looks like Mac’s old, “haggard” boyfriend to heart, Dennis applies “face tape,” pulling his features into a tightening rictus.) Even the swap in of a heavily Frank-ified Artemis and the Waitress (“I’m getting paid for this, right?”) for those volleyballs scores higher than he does.

Mac, Charlie, and Dee want to be the focal point of the Gang’s adventures, but Dennis needs it. Glenn Howerton is never more thrillingly, chillingly hilarious than when Dennis’ clutching desire to be perceived as the one true alpha protagonist and smartest person in the room is threatened. The third run-through sees Dennis grasping back the reins, reverting the dinner conversation back to his widest-appeal small talk while wrenching his face even tighter. (He also expertly styles Charlie’s new wig, Charlie’s suggestion that Dennis must wear a piece too only ramping up Dennis’ already simmering ego-storm.)

When things go south (Mac has Kid Rock hidden in a below-table boom box, Dee tries to improv off the lone line Dennis gave her), Dennis’ direct appeal to the confused audience is the sort of spotlight scene that can keep a longtime cast standout with one eye on the series door in the fold. His face a slathered and tautly-cinched mask of menace and entreaty, Dennis pleads with the crowd that he is “classy,” “refined,” and “dignified,” beseeching them in peerlessly unnerving one man show monologue cadence, “I need you to see this… I need this of you. You must make it so.”

And even if one previously sneering viewer calls Dennis’ creepy address “amazing,” the scores come back at a lowly 3 (out of 100), while Dennis explains to the Gang that his long-ago public meltdown on the game show Family Fight has been behind his obsessive quest for TV normalcy. There, like here, Dennis imagined himself the unimpeachable star. Here, like there, his manifold insecurities in the face of possible humiliation rendered him into the embarrassing, emasculated spectacle he most feared. Again, the four junior members of the Gang all fancy themselves more competent and impressive than they could ever actually be, but there’s a truly malign narcissism lurking within Dennis Reynolds that makes all those dark hints about serial predation (with all their implications) feel at least within the realm of possibility.

Naturally, all the Gang’s plotting is for naught, as they realize in collective shock that their month-long retooling effort has seen them miss the planned TV dinner by two whole weeks. No matter, as the already-broadcast family gathering saw Frank recasting his kids and their friends with a multicultural quartet of clean, group-hugging, network-friendly actors. Despite Charlie’s late-episode summation that “We’re trying to please everybody and, like, that never works, man. People need to get you or they don’t get you,” even Frank knew that no amount of market research could ever make this Gang palatable to that mythical Middle America.

Stray observations

• I genuinely didn’t realize that was Artemis Pebdani as the bald-capped Frank. It would only make sense that Frank’s sometimes-lover would know how to get into Frank’s head. At least.
• Turns out Mac was shooting for a Vernon Wells in Commando tough guy look when he accidentally landed on Freddie. Not that big a leap, honestly.
• Charlie reveals he was going for a Balki accent when he landed on Borat. Bronson Pinchot walked so Sacha Cohen could run.
• Revisiting the whole “is Dennis a serial killer?'“ thing, I maintain that it’s important to the character that he not be. For all his borderline criminal deceptive womanizing (and the rope, duct tape and such he keeps in his trunk), the central appeal of Dennis for me is his embodiment of the yawning inadequacy and impotence at the heart of every would-be alpha douche.
• Dennis’ to-audience claim that he and roommate Mac are merely “two men entwined only by the walls that house us and the passage of time, nothing more” is Glenn Howerton majestic.
• Not to give notes to a show with all the viewing numbers in this benighted world, but The Golden Bachelor as presented here appears awfully lax in its policies. That Frank is shown in a TV promo gabbling through a mouthful of hot dog about the time the Gang tossed Charlie’s real father off a cliff in Ireland (“He was soup!”) and is still considered a viable suitor should really set off a whole chorus of warning sirens.
• Only one episode to go in Season 17, sadly. As Dennis speculates, Frank’s motive for going on the dating show is either a desire for “fame, attention, or maybe he just wants to bang a bunch of old ladies.” Tune in to find out.