Six months ago, the world’s unlikeliest crossover became a reality when the gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia appeared on Abbott Elementary. It gave the unfailingly sweet show a chance to show a little edge, while letting the gang run loose in a wholly new environment—look at our adorably imaginative people-pleaser Janine (Quinta Brunson) getting ready to scrap with Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson)! But their respective tv homes are wholly different territories (the adult-inclined FX for Sunny vs the more broad-appealing ABC for Abbott), a fact I forgot about until Ava’s (Janelle James) hilariously timed “sh*theads” left me wondering if I heard correctly, only to have my jaw drop when aforementioned cutie pie Janine, with little hesitation, drops an entirely uncensored c-bomb.
Abbott just got a whole lot wilder.
It’s been two years since Sunny’s 16th season aired, and the depths of the gang’s depravity have blurred in my memory despite being a longtime viewer. But from the moment deviant goofballs Charlie (Charlie Day), Frank (Danny DeVito), and Mac (Rob Mac, because yes, that’s how he’s now credited on the show, which makes us wonder if his colleagues are as annoyed as the rest of us) started scheming to “pull a Blind Side on ‘em,” i.e. recruit an exceptionally tall child into their alma mater’s basketball team, I remembered who we were dealing with, and that’s to say nothing of the horrifying mixup in the bathroom (“What’s it gonna take to convince you to leave a place like this and come with us?”).
Diehard Abbott fans who may have tuned into the Sunny premiere might object to the extent of its degenerate humor, as people have throughout the show’s twenty-year run, but it allows the Abbott cast to play off of it beautifully (“A basketball recruit? Oh, thank God! My mind was going to terrible places”). It’s an extremely funny show all on its own—the scene where Ava mocks Janine’s exasperated panting broke me on each rewatch of this episode—but seeing Abbott play straight guy to Sunny’s gleefully incompetent debauchery makes for a great bit of synergistic tv.
Though most of the individual Sunny hijinks was shown in the Abbott episode—save for Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who, we’ve now discovered, spent much of the time operating an impromptu coffee operation thanks to his unique blend of sporadic cleverness mixed with spite (“I’m like Walter White over here”)—the “additional footage” provides us some extra insight on more of the gang’s ridiculous stunts during their weeklong community service. When Frank (Danny DeVito), Charlie (Charlie Day), and Dennis’ plan to assemble an underage boy band is thwarted (“You see, the bad boy is the most important one. Because the bad boy makes the sexual component less weird”), they turn their attention to a slightly more well-intended plan to give the kids a history lesson by having their teachers do an updated rendition of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Sheryl Lee Ralph’s over-the-top adlibs are superb). Their reaction to discovering Fall Out Boy beat them to the punch is dramatic, to say the least.
Now that the double episode crossover is complete, my final verdict is that it’s a nice shakeup for the typically PG-13 series, though the blend results in what feels like a slightly muted Sunny; the sensation evens out a smidge only in the final few minutes, when the setting is reversed and the gang is back on their own soiled turf at Paddy’s Pub. It’s a great one-off (two-off?) event, but I’m looking forward to seeing the gang occupying a full half hour rather than share the screen time. But like the city of Philadelphia, my weekly viewing schedule is big enough for the both of them.
Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba.
