REVIEW: Season 17 Of 'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia' Feels Like Watching Classic 'Sunny' While Microdosing Ghost Peppers

Disclaimer: This review contains minor spoilers for Season 17, episodes 1-3, of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Season 17 marks the 20th anniversary since It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia premiered in August 2005 on FX (with the latest season currently airing via FXX and next-day Hulu). Inherent in reviews for the Gang’s latest eight episode offering includes frequent marveling over the secret of its successful longevity across two decades of an ever-shifting socio-political landscape, to say nothing of maintaining a 20-year foothold with the same television network, or even of said network’s success in sustaining itself amidst brushes with streaming wars and/or oligarchal oversight. 

Multiple interviews with showrunners seem to stress the importance of maintaining joy for the project at hand, e.g.: Danny DeVito (Frank Reynolds) recently referred to the show as “I Love Lucy on acid. It’s been a joy and I look forward to it.” Concurs “pop-culture journalist” Kimberly Potts in a recent interview to promote her upcoming Sunny memoir, “No one” attached to the show “ever had a bad thing to say. And that’s pretty unusual about a show that’s gone on that long.” Potts then connects viewers’ ‘acceptance’ of the Gang’s shenanigans to fans having gotten to know the actual cast and crew, et al behind them over the years - or at least, trusting that “they’re nothing like the characters”; ergo, “It’s okay to laugh at their [characters’] hijinks on camera.” Overall, Potts credits the “complete positivity” surrounding Sunny for its longevity. Likewise, Gemma Wilson acknowledges that while Sunny premiered in an era wherein “America’s cultural appetite for meanness was pretty high,” the characters being forced to confront “current events and cultural shifts” as they age is yet funny because “the Gang continues to be the worst … but at least they’re so comically vile there’s no mistaking the show as endorsing their choices.”

© FX

“I Need to Say a Bad Word”

Season 17 of Sunny opens with some long-awaited rounding out of unfinished business - namely, the Gang’s ‘side’ of their week of community service that they get sentenced to perform at Abbott Elementary School in west Philadelphia following a scheme involving dumping 100 gallons of baby oil, along with 500 Paddy’s Pub t-shirts and a Cybertruck, into the Schuylkill River (Abbott Elementary, “Volunteers” [4x9]). Suffice it to say, the Gang makes a lasting impression at Abbott, as Principal Ava Coleman describes at length in Sunny’s Season 17 premiere, “The Gang F**ks Up Abbott Elementary.” The episode functions somewhat as a clip show, with Ava sharing security footage of the Gang’s week-long volunteering stint, albeit with several new-to-the-viewer ‘flashbacks’ and other Abbott characters providing their own commentary. 

While the conceit of a crossover between two Philly-based sitcoms is obvious, the logistics are tricky, given that one sitcom is populated by a group of local criminals who should clearly never have unsupervised access to minors, let alone underprivileged, inner city minors in a public school setting. On the Sunny side, it’s not the first time that the Gang has been sentenced to community service involving working with children: Early on in the series, “The Gang Gives Back” (2x6) reveals the legal consequences of burning down a rival business owner’s property (albeit accidentally) in a previous episode (“The Gang Goes Jihad” [2x5]) aka coaching rival youth basketball teams, a task which the Gang almost immediately fumbles by making everything about themselves. Fast forward to 2025, wherein the Gang’s "unrepentant, unaware” behavior has only pathologized over the years, meaning their "comically vile” (Wilson) shamelessness overlaid with viewer pathos for characters whose refusal to change their ways for the past 20 years has also led to their unchanged (or perhaps, worsened) circumstances.

“I’d Rip This Whole School Bald!”

If anything, forcing the Gang outside of the comfort and relative safety of Paddy’s Pub to mingle with pretty much anyone outside of their immediate social circle and/or collection of beefs about town hammers home how decades of self-imposed isolation, alcoholism, and bad behavior have rendered them incapable of blending into the rest of society even as well as they did in earlier eras of Sunny. Case-in-point: Even though the Gang initially skirts around disclosing that their volunteering stint at Abbott is community service until Abbott Elementary fan favorite, Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter) recognizes them as the proprietors of “some gross bar” in south Philly “with like 300 one-star reviews” (Abbott Elementary, “Volunteers”), their suspicious behavior precedes their local reputation. For instance, the Gang requests an empty room at Abbott in order to mostly contain their screaming asides and/or heated in-house discussions on everything from 9/11 to Fall Out Boy. 

Likewise, whereas many well-meaning yet problematic non-POC guest stars on Abbott Elementary often portray subtle and/or nuanced prejudicial behavior - Ava spends much of Season 4 blackmailing the wealthy, smarmy, Caucasian proprietor of a local golf course for resources for the school in exchange for turning a blind eye to the city’s gentrification efforts - the Gang remains startlingly obtuse. At one point, Dee Reynolds (Kaitlin Olson) attempts to assuage fears that they might catch lice in a public school setting by pointing out (incorrectly) that “Black people can’t get lice.” Likewise, Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) later muses that “White people aren’t supposed to help Black people anymore” as commentary on the modern-day backlash against ‘White savior’ media like The Blind Side (2009). Unsurprisingly, the Gang ramps up to attempting to recruit tall kids to play basketball for the high school they themselves graduated from in the late ‘90s, as well as trying to put together a boy band. Finally, it is heavily implied that the Gang lures Abbott staff to Paddy’s Pub at the end of the week to bestow upon them a new espresso machine while Frank makes good on his promise to rip “a hundred feet of copper” from the school’s very walls, something Ava comically corroborates as a money-saver, as “the state was gonna make us move out some old pipes, so actually he saved us a few grand in construction costs.”

© FX

“Yes, Chef!”

Season 17’s other early exploits include a temporary dissolution of Gang dynamics when Frank seemingly falls into a coma and Dennis, Charlie, and Mac (Rob Mac) immediately ditch Dee at his bedside in order to attend a business gala with pie-eyed dreams of franchising Paddy’s Pub (“Frank Is In A Coma”). Alas, said dreams quickly turn to dust like so much snorted cocaine when the boys fall into a reluctant mentorship with Simon (Alex Wolff), a young entrepreneur currently running his late father’s business empire … until Simon ODs in the corner while the Gang conducts one of their infamous asides. Back at home, Dee reluctantly works though each of Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief while Frank lies in a coma, accompanied by a private nurse (played by Audrey Wasilewski) … until it is revealed that Dee has been spilling her guts to a hyper-realistic lookalike of her sleeping father made of cake, one of several seasonal homages to Sunny’s TV contemporaries. Similarly, Charlie’s cooking skills take center stage in “Dennis and Mac Become EMTs” (17x3), which parodies fellow FX show, The Bear, following the exploits of a fine dining chef returning home to Chicago to take over the family sandwich shop. The frenetic pace of cutaways between Charlie chopping food and the Gang’s increasingly demented foray into microdosing chili peppers as they repeatedly fail to learn to be EMTs and/or deliver orders (from whom?) from Charlie’s ghost kitchen invoke some of the Gang’s ‘classic’ misadventures, e.g.: “Charlie Work” (10x4), wherein the camera follows Charlie as he lopes around Paddy’s while shmoozing a health inspector.

By far, the episode’s biggest crowd-pleaser is the long-awaited return of The Lawyer (Brian Unger), whose handful of run-ins with the Gang over the years have begun to take their toll. Now sporting an eyepatch (the result of having an eye pecked out by the local McPoyle family patriarch’s pet Poconos Swallow), The Lawyer, clearly hard up, encounters Frank at the hospital while skulking around for new clients and makes it clear that he intends to help a recent Paddy’s patron sue Frank for ‘pranking’ him into eating a hot pepper. Eventually, The Lawyer is tricked into imbibing part of a California Reaper pepper, only to awaken in the midst of a wild ride through Philadelphia in a decommissioned ambulance whose erratic movements slosh the cooking grease from Charlie’s now-mobile ghost kitchen directly onto his face. When the Gang’s own foray into ghost pepper microdosing leaves Dennis temporarily blind, The Lawyer is not only left behind at the inevitable crash site but also stuffed into an EMT costume and covered in hot grease. The episode ends with the “gnarled, burned, partially blinded legal professional” being sentenced to 30 days in jail for the Gang’s misdeeds, seemingly placing The Lawyer on the tragic trajectory of other characters whose lives have worsened as they continue to orbit around Frank, et al. As Cracked aptly notes, the episode is evidence that Sunny plans to “Continue … Its Noble Tradition of Gradually Deforming Guest Stars.” Perhaps, The Lawyer will team up with none other than disgraced priest-cum-street rat, Matthew “Rickety Cricket” Mara against the Gang!

Eternal Optimism of the Spotted Minds

After 17 seasons of the Gang refusing to learn from their mistakes, their latest attempts to shortcut reality and public decency tend to take the form of corporate goonery, wherein “the Gang craves money and parasitic social privileges. That’s been plain since 2005.” FX's latest promotional materials for its(/America's) longest-running sitcom likewise allude to future Season 17 forays into “cross-network promotion,” “scapegoat[ing] one of their own to avoid a PR backlash,” and “risk[ing] everything for a handshake with the Saudis,” all of which allude, of course, to their painfully human natures: “They crave love … respect … conditional freedom … constant adulation ... histrionic amounts of attention … non-stop gratification … and unfiltered, slaphappy eroticism.” Fortunately, their presumed collective future failure tints the Gang’s troubling lack of follow-through on schemes, as well as their increasingly Dorian Gray-esque relationship with The Lawyer, et al with demented delight rather than outright tragedy. Likewise, every so often, the Gang’s benevolent real-life keepers throw them a bone, allowing a surprisingly sweet moment and/or implication to play out. For instance, Miller notes that Season 17’s upcoming tribute to the late Lynne Marie Stewart, who passed in February after portraying Charlie Kelly’s mom since Season 1, exudes “sincere emotion,” as does the show’s recent tribute to entertainment producer and Philadelphia native Eric Biermann, who passed away in October 2024 at age 42. 

Said spots of sincerity can be bittersweet, however: Though Charlie learning to read at a kindergarten level during the Sunny-Abbott crossover is “Unlikely” to lead to him “turn[ing] over a new leaf” and/or “leav[ing] his unsavory friends from Paddy’s behind” - per Charlie Day, “Charlie Kelly probably went and huffed a little too much spray paint … right after that episode of Abbott” - his on-screen rapport with Abbott kindergarten teacher, Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph) is surprisingly heartfelt, all the more so when Charlie briefly showcases his natural music-writing talent (Barbara loves to sing with her church choir). Alas, Day offers wryly, “We’re not really interested in any actual growth on our show. So I think it’s fun and cute that he learned to read in the Abbott episode, and it’s fitting in the Sunny world that he quickly forgets.” Adds Glenn Howerton, “They’re very motivated characters. They’re just putting their energy in the wrong places.” Never change, guys.

Rating: ★★★★☆

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About It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 17

Premiere Date: July 9, 2025

Episode Count: 8

Executive Producer/Showrunner: Rob Mac, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton

Writer: Rob Mac, Charlie Day, David Hornsby, Javi Scott, Nina Pedrad, Keyonna Taylor

Director: Ashly Burch, Imani Hakim, Zachary Knighton

Production: RCG

Distribution: FXX

Cast: Rob Mac, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito, David Hornsby, Mary Elizabeth Ellis

Synopsis: Five friends with big egos and small brains are the proprietors of an Irish pub in Philadelphia.