Review: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "The War on Alcohol"| Season 18, Episode 6

I don’t love it but I can work with it. 

By this point in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's storied history, its a simultaneous blessing and curse that everybody in the cast is so good at their jobs. An episode like "The War on Alcohol" can throw down the flimsiest of premises ("Hey, let's go recruit real men to drink at Paddy's again!") and reliably reap at least subsistence-level rewards by simply having the actors do their thing.

That's been a running theme of Season 18, which is now heading for the home stretch of its eight-episode run. The five episodes before this have been more or less good, not great. (Here, naturally I'm grading on a curve—the most pedestrian It's Always Sunny episode operates on a baseline of accumulated quality most modern sitcoms could only wish for.) The Gang's misadventures often begin from a seemingly uninspired place, stemming as they traditionally do from whatever hot button issue or minor grievance one or more members choose to care about at that instant.

But a great Sunny takes up that slim narrative thread and weaves it—along with well-established group dynamics and the uniformly stellar cast's commitment—into a toxically hilarious web into which the outside world occasionally and unwisely stumbles. Individual weaknesses and neuroses coalesce around the briefly trapped focus of the Gang's malign interest until everything explodes in a jaw-loosening anti-catharsis of shared and inescapable miserableness.