It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season 16 Review: The Gang Is (Almost) Back On Form

At a time when it seems like every older male comedian regularly complains in interviews about increased censorship in comedy, the continued success of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" tends to go overlooked. Now in its 16th season, extending its run as the longest-running live-action sitcom on the air, the show continues to pick up a new generation of young fans even as it routinely pushes the buttons comedy's elder statesmen claim you can't anymore.

The show always delivers dark laughs, but it's never just offense for the sake of offense — each of the gang's ill-thought-through schemes for success, for revenge, or to atone for a previous mistake helps uncover a myriad of new ways in which they are the worst people in the world. It's a series that, for nearly two decades, has pulled off the impossible feat of having its characters offend every demographic imaginable while making sure they're always the butt of the joke. Perhaps this lack of punching down is why it tends to get overlooked by any aging comedy star who complains about "cancel culture."

As should be expected with any sitcom this deep into its run, there are increasing signs of wear and tear. The 15th season, which aired late in 2021, featured a fantastic multi-episode arc following the Gang as they visited Ireland. Unfortunately, this was preceded by some of the laziest episodes to date, two of which stumbled satirically while taking on major events of the prior year (the January 6 insurrection and pop culture's clumsy response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020) — while another was, by some distance, the outright worst episode yet to have aired. "The Gang Buys a Roller Rink" invoked comparisons with late-period "Simpsons" episodes as it rewrote established series canon for the sake of parodying a kitschy movie genre. It felt like a sign of a show running out of ideas, a hurriedly put-together origin story written solely to pad out a season length to the required episode order. Thankfully, the show has rebounded considerably in its latest run, and while it isn't quite back at vintage "Sunny" levels, this back-to-basics affair delivers multiple belly laughs in each installment.

The primary reason why this season is more successful in comparison to the last is the topical targets the writing team has chosen to skewer. When it came to the weightier themes last time around, it felt like episodes were reverse-engineered to tackle specific subject matter head-on, forcing the Gang to be at the center of the national conversation. Here, the stakes are much lower in ways that recall the stripped-down storytelling of the earliest seasons; the premiere episode "The Gang Inflates," for example, deals with the recession entirely through the attempts of Mac (Rob McElhenney) and Dennis (Glenn Howerton) to start a business renting out inflatable furniture. And that's about as topical as the series gets, with the only other major headline directly invoked being the chess player who was publicly accused of cheating via ... well, I'm not going to spoil the show's faithful take on it, aside from applauding the ways in which it manages to find new ways to make Danny DeVito act out the most visceral physical comedy imaginable as Frank. The veteran comic actor remains just as game as ever to embrace his disgusting side.

The strangest thing about "It's Always Sunny" at this stage in its run is just how much of a comfort watch it has reliably become, something that the writers are keenly aware of. As with more recent seasons, episodes double up as semi-sequels to fan favorites and find punchlines to long-running gags that it wasn't immediately apparent were even there. Take, for example, Frank and Charlie (Charlie Day), who have slept together on a sofa bed for the majority of the show's run. The established bit of the show's grimy canon is upended in the season's first episode in a way that deftly pulls the rug from under the audience and its central characters.

Unlike the last season's heavy-handed attempts to refashion how the Gang first met each other, we're back to simple reveals that get enough comic mileage to last an entire episode, without needing to bend established dynamics for the sake of telling a joke. The fact that Day, McElhenney, and Howerton are now regularly revisiting old episodes on the "It's Always Sunny" podcast has also played a part in seeing them revisit plot holes from some of the earliest installments to have aired, with one episode reintroducing Charlie's twin sisters -– yes, two characters who haven't been mentioned at all since the Season 1 episode "Charlie Got Molested" all the way back in 2005. Adhering to the show's established canon isn't a necessity, but the way the show broke away from it in the previous season felt lazily cobbled together to the point of insulting the oldest fans; this season takes more consideration with its references.

One exception to this rule is an episode that sees Dennis reveal the gender-flipped sequel to his infamous "D.E.N.N.I.S System" to make women fall for him, but as with all the jokes that don't quite hit the mark this season, they're complemented by several that do in each outing. For me, the strongest of the six episodes which screened for critics (out of the season's eight in total) was "Risk E. Rat's Pizza and Amusement Center," one of the semi-meta episodes in the vein of Season 9's "The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award." As the gang goes on an expedition to a Chuck E. Cheese-style pizza parlor they visited as kids, aiming to relive their fond memories of physical violence, racist jokes from the animatronic entertainers, and robot boobs, they discover that the times have changed, and what passed as acceptable in their youth is a horrifying memory the wider world has moved past.

Arriving at a time where every comedian of a certain age gives breathless interviews calling out "cancel culture," and stars of shows as comedically toothless as "Friends" and "The Office" complain that you couldn't make a sitcom like theirs today, it hits its satirical targets perfectly; if this is a time you're nostalgic for, the episode argues, then maybe it's time to move on. With two further seasons already greenlit, it's an episode — and, ultimately, a season — that's renewed my faith in the Gang's abilities to find new ways to be awful for many more years to come. It's not vintage "Sunny," but it is closer to peak form than it has been for a while.

"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" Season 16 premieres June 7 on FXX.