Review: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The Guys Have a Sleepover"| Season 18, Episode 10

More than 20 years ago, a trio of perennially unemployed actors shot a pilot for literally nothing. (Charlie Day says the oft-quoted $200 figure for what became the unaired pilot is high by about $200.) That we're not only still watching that show, but that those three now-very employed actors, a fourth equally in-demand, and a TV legend still plug away at the same deliberately juvenile premise each year is something like a gift. Especially since It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is rightly proclaimed one of the best and boldest sitcoms of all time.

Has Season 18 been a disappointment? Yup. Sunny is such a deceptively delicate mechanism that it doesn't take but a single errant grain of sand to topple the whole enterprise over into something that seems like a parody of itself. So, so many shows have launched themselves in Sunny's wake as the new, "edgy," "raw," or "insert misunderstood cliché" comedy sensation that their calamitous crashouts have only propelled Sunny's reputation ahead further. When the show is on, Sunny makes reprehensible behavior transcendentally funny. When, as in much of Season 18, it's off, Sunny brays and hollers and sweats in pursuit of effects it's used to pulling off like magic tricks.

Thankfully, we've always got The Gang. Here I'm talking about Rob McElhenney (or Rob Mac if he insists), Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito. Setting Danny aside, these are the nobodies who pitched a grubby little show to a fledgeling network and who now find themselves not only beloved, but respected members of the comedy elite. (Emmys be damned.) Not everything the quartet has done outside of Sunny has been a success—Charlie Day's bid for Hollywood auteur status plummeted under the weight of Day's ambitions—but he and his three cohorts have forged more than respectable careers away from Paddy's Pub.