Spoilers ahead for “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” the season-17 premiere of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
If there were only one reason for the Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia crossover to exist, it would be to see prim, proper, borderline-prissy Janine Teagues tell a documentary camera crew that she thinks Dee Reynolds is a “total fucking cunt.” What a shocking thing to hear this committed children’s educator say. What a wonderfully nasty bit of character expansion. What an opportunity for Quinta Brunson to surprise us with her confident line delivery, and for Tyler James Williams to sell the moment with Gregory’s wide-eyed surprise. And what an unexpectedly gracious way for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the elder statesman of live-action TV comedy, to let the surging Abbott push its sense of humor to a deliciously vulgar new realm.
Both halves of this crossover would seem to skew toward Abbott, at least on the surface. Both January’s “Volunteers” and July 9’s “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” use the ABC sitcom’s mockumentary style of breaking the fourth wall; each relies on the Abbott crew’s disgust with the Gang to create narrative friction between the two groups; and most everything that happens in these episodes has implications for the school rather than Paddy’s Pub. You know that within the world of Abbott, Jacob will be dining out for months on the story of confronting Frank, Charlie, and Mac as they’re complimenting a high-school boy’s physique in a school bathroom, while Frank, Charlie, and Mac surely forgot about Jacob as soon as they left West Philly and went back south. The Gang’s recall of people they don’t care about isn’t good; for all they know, Jacob and The Lawyer might be the same guy.
But that’s all within the interior world of these shows. In our world, where It’s Always Sunny has been TV’s longest-running live-action comedy since 2021, this crossover is both an elevation of the series’ previous nods to other forms of TV storytelling (season ten’s “The Gang Goes on Family Fight,” season 12’s “Making Dennis Reynolds a Murderer”) and a canny exercise in brand management. This is the Gang being so distinctly drawn by Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Danny DeVito, and Kaitlin Olson that they can wander into an entirely different TV ecosystem and lose no aspect of themselves; this is the Gang being so established in their specific strain of folly that other series will bend themselves to accommodate it.
Transplanting the Gang to an elementary school where they spread chaos among children and adults is an inspired idea, but ultimately familiar — many of the Gang’s adventures involve them interacting with normal people and ruining their lives. However, the point of these two crossover episodes isn’t necessarily narrative. We don’t even know if Charlie actually learns to read! Instead, the appeal of this pairing for It’s Always Sunny fans is to watch these actors show off their elastic control over these characters — the good-natured dumbness Day brings to Charlie’s confused grin, or the muscles that pop in Howerton’s neck when Dennis slides into sociopath mode — and bounce their chemistry off of actors with very different charms. “These jabronis,” Melissa Schemmenti insults the Gang, but these jabronis know exactly what they’re doing.
“Volunteers” aired early on in Abbott’s fourth season, in between established subplots about Janine and Gregory’s romantic relationship and the school’s blackmailing dynamic with the Girard Creek Golf Club, and before longer arcs about the citywide bus drivers’ strike and Ava Coleman leaving her position as principal. Functionally, it’s a feel-good one-off, with most of the Gang’s high jinks resulting in moments of growth or satisfaction for the Abbott team: When Gregory rebuffs Dee’s flirtations, Janine becomes more confident in the strength of their relationship; when Barbara teaches Charlie how to read, her skills in teaching adult literacy are affirmed. All of this is on the wackier side for Abbott (especially when the episode sneaks in a surprisingly risqué joke about eating ass), but ultimately, “Volunteers” is pleasant, infused with the warm earnestness that defines so much of the series. Going into “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary,” the only outstanding question from “Volunteers” was what Dennis was up to while he was hiding from the documentary camera crew. The answer comes quickly: In a typical moment of obsessive pique, Dennis uses lab equipment to build a coffee-brewing setup and tries to get on the teachers’ good sides by serving up their super-complicated orders. But otherwise, where “Volunteers” was about how the teachers would react to, as Janine calls them, “criminal criminals” trespassing in their school, “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” delivers a compressed version of the Gang’s particular absurdist quirks.
When “Volunteers” nodded to Dee being insulted as “a bird” and Charlie’s affinity for milk steak, they amounted to cute Easter eggs. But as “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” digs more voraciously into the awfulness of these people, into their countless grudges and tendency toward groupthink, it stops being cute and starts being grotesque in that unique It’s Always Sunny way. Dee is casually racist about Abbott’s majority Black students and employees, as she was with all her caricatures in season four’s “America’s Next Top Paddy’s Billboard Model Contest.” Frank obliviously sexualizes the kids, like he did in season seven’s children’s-pageant episode, “Frank Reynolds’ Little Beauties.” Charlie is aghast at the students’ dearth of patriotism, revealing a nationalist streak that also fueled season two’s “Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody’s Ass” and season five’s “The Gang Wrestles for the Troops.” The Gang gets obsessed with trading 9/11 conspiracy theories, a moment of political ignorance that brings to mind their shock at learning that the U.S. was then involved in two wars in the Middle East in season six’s “Mac’s Big Break.” Everything the Gang does in this premiere is a furthering of what they’ve done before, and for viewers, a subtle reminder of their longevity.
It may feel like “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” serving as the season premiere is It’s Always Sunny getting the crossover out of the way so that it can get into even more vile business in the remaining seven episodes, and on one level, that’s true. The rest of the season includes the Gang seriously injuring strangers, objectifying women, hosting an orgy, breaking up a happy family, and (of course) harassing Cricket and the Waitress — you know, the classics. But on another level, “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” is a flex, raising the curtain on this 17th season with a vivid illustration of the show’s consistency. Within this crossover, It’s Always Sunny gets the last word by highlighting in singular detail just how disruptive the Gang actually is, from inspiring Janine to say “cunt” to Frank literally destroying a bathroom as his final act within Abbott’s walls. Later this season, It’s Always Sunny will crossover with The Golden Bachelor, too, in another opportunity for the series to cannonball into an outside franchise and upset its normalcy. The Gang survives and the Gang endures, and It’s Always Sunny’s now-tenured position in the industry has granted the series new freedom to fuck things up.
Related
- ‘Here’s This School, and We’ve Just Introduced 5 Sociopaths’
- ‘There Are Always Lessons’ When Making Abbott Elementary
- 20 Essential Episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
And that word is “c- – -.”
