It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

[Caleb]

Sorry if there is already a thread, I couldn't find it.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/106903/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-gang-wrestles-for-the-troops#s-p1-so-i0

So great.  I never really liked Danny Devito all that much before this but I find him hilarious in the latest episode.

Roddy Piper was just so great in this.  It was just so funny when I realized during his second scene that he was mocking Rourke's character in "The Wrestler". 

A bucket full of Chestnuts!

I never watched this show before but I caught a couple of episodes online and parts of it are amazing.  I feel kind of bad that I might have missed out on this since I don't watch TV at home any more.

Does anyone else like this show?

[Scandanavian War Machine]

I love Always Sunny. One of the best shows on tv, hands down.

Last night's episode had me laughing my ass of the entire time.

"Does YOUR cat walk around too much?! Does YOUR cat make too much noise when it's walking around?! YOU NEED KITTEN-MITTENS!"

Charlie is definitely my favorite character.

[Caleb]

I could watch this ALL DAY.

[Muppet King]

I believe it was spelled Kitten-Mittons.

[Alex C]

Always Sunny has such aggressively stupid characters that I cannot help but love it. It's a shame that between work, boarding and gaming that I have so little time to watch it. It is my favorite indefensible thing.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

Always Sunny has such aggressively stupid characters that I cannot help but love it.

exactly.

I always liked how, for a while, almost every episode ended with somebody saying "You are the worst people on the planet!"

[Alex C]

I just like how there's an episode called "Frank Sets Sweet Dee On Fire." I haven't even seen that one yet, but come on!

[Caleb]

I know there is an episode with water-boarding.  I have to see that.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

and let's not forget all the horrible things they've done to Rickety Cricket over the years.

[scarred]

I just like how there's an episode called "Frank Sets Sweet Dee On Fire." I haven't even seen that one yet, but come on!

oh god that is such a good episode

almost as good as the one when they find the dumpster baby

[scarred]

also i am very attracted to the recurring character of the Waitress

[Scandanavian War Machine]

also i am very attracted to the recurring character of the Waitress

Me too! She is quite the attractive young lady.
Fun Facts: her and Charlie are married in real life, which makes their interaction in the show even more hilarious. Also, Rob(Mac) and Dee (whatever her name is) are married in real life as well (this one seriously surprised me)

The More You Know

[scarred]

Logically that must mean Dennis and Danny DeVito are married.

[De_El]

Their naming convention and the way the timing of the title card for each episode is so good.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

Yeah, I like how the name of each episode doesn't really leave much to the imagination as far as the main plot goes, yet each episode is still packed full of suprises and hilarity.

"Sweet Dee Is Dating A Retarded Person" for example. One of my favorite episodes of all time. OF ALL TIME.

[Alex C]

Indeed, there has never been any doubt in my mind that Sweet Dee is going to be set on fire in the episode I mentioned. Always Sunny doesn't do metaphors. It's really just a question of how many times she'll be set on fire and whether she'll get any help putting herself out.

[LeeC]

I liked one where they are trying to help charlie get a date so they sign him up for a dating website.  the entire dialog between the guys while they are filling out his profile is too funny!  It reminded me of when my brother wanted to make me a myspace page, it happened just like that, I answered his questions and he just wrote something else haha.

[Chesire Cat]

Favourite food, "Milksteak", haha you start boiling the milk, Ill get the steak.

My fav was S02E03, where Dennis and Dee are on Welfare, when they were sitting on their steps blastin' the boombox and drinking beers out of paper bags. Mac tries to talk them out of what they are doing, so they just ignore him completely, turn the volume back up and start singing again, not to mention the scene where they buy crack.

I really enjoy the constant over the top references to white guilt and the certainty that if there is a plot, its unspoken that someone already betrayed the other and everyone is on board with it.

[Inlander]

Every now and then I see this show listed in the T.V. guide late at night, but I've never seen a review of it by any Australian T.V. reviewer and on the one or two occasions when I've tuned in to see what it was I obviously suffered from lack of prior knowledge. Can someone give me a quick synopsis of the show and characters along with some other basic info, like how long it's been on the air for?

[blanktom]

Or, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Always_Sunny_in_Philadelphia

I left my laptop downloading the entire Seasons 1-4 and I've just got up and watched a few episodes. I like it a lot, it has elements of some of my favorite American sitcoms eg Curb Your Enthusiasm and Arrested Development but there's something about the characters, Alex C summed it up pretty well, they're so aggressively . I am looking forward to getting to Danny DeVito in Season 2.

[20 jazz funk greats]

i've actually finished downloading the first four seasons recently but haven't started watching them yet.
i might do that at some point today.

[KvP]

Get yours today!

[Chesire Cat]

HAHAHAHAHAHAaaaaaaaaaaaaa... I want kitten mittons

[Alex C]

There's now 5 seasons of the show, which makes it pretty tough to summarize, but I'll try. The show is about "the Gang," and their shenanigans. The episodes are largely self-contained but there's quite a few running jokes and the show will generally seem less inexplicable if you realize going in that all of the characters are incredibly selfish and are about as loyal as socially maladjusted vultures. They are constantly betraying one another over money, sex and petty slights. Much of the show takes place in a poorly ran bar (Paddy's) owned at various points by several of the characters.

A quick run down of the 5 primaries:

Dennis: Vain, stupid, drunken lech. Dee's twin brother.

Deandra, aka, Sweet Dee: Drunken, stupid black sheep. Target of rampant sexism and receives little to no respect from the rest of the cast, even from her twin brother. Bartender at Paddy's. As far as I'm aware, she's the only one never allowed to become a co-owner of the bar. Her ideas are routinely dismissed by the other characters only to be adopted later with no credit being given to her.

Mac: Vain, stupid, drunken hypocrite. Likes to act the tough guy and usually gets his ass kicked for it.

Charlie: So stupid the rest of the cast thinks he's stupid. When he's not drinking he's sniffing glue. Freakishly durable. Has a crush on The Waitress and lives in squalor.

Frank: Only introduced after a few seasons. Played by Danny DeVito, he is Dennis and Dee's legal but not biological father. Lives with Charlie (who may be his biological child) despite having a surprising amount of wealth and illegal connections. Often gets the best of other cast members through experience, but is still mostly stupid. Often is gambling or otherwise mixed up in shady deals. Last I checked he is the primary owner of Paddy's now.


Other important characters:

The Waitress: works at a coffee shop. She's obsessed with Dennis, who isn't interested, and Charlie is obsessed with her, so she often ends up getting involved in whatever stupid shit is going on from episode to episode.

Cricket: A homeless guy who suffers greatly at the hands of the Gang. Former priest who wouldn't be homeless if it weren't for the main characters. Dennis and Mac teabag him constantly. He is attracted to Sweet Dee.

[Scarychips]

After everything everyone said, I decided to check out an episode. Let me tell you, wow. I didn't laugh that hard for a long while. I watched the Kitten Mittons episode. It's gold. Next time I'm at the library, I am renting the first two seasons for sure.

[michaelicious]

I am really happy this show is starting to get a bit bigger. It is probably my favourite television show of all time. My best friend and I dressed up as Charlie and Mac for Halloween last year.

Haven't seen the Kitten Mittens episode yet.

[KvP]

It's like Seinfeld, but the characters aren't upper-class and the fact that they're awful people is the whole point of the show, rather than a persistent undercurrent.

[Inlander]

"Upper class"? Seinfeld? Where on earth do you get that from? The four main characters ranged from lower- to "middle"-middle class, at best.

[Alex C]

I think it's just easy to have that impression at times because Jerry is always pretty successful and in many ways he sets the tone for the show. Elaine's career also has a lot of highs as well as lows and Kramer is basically completely insulated from consequences, in part due to some large sum of money he acquired before the series began. Hell, even George managed to work for the Yankees and regularly talk to George Steinbrenner for a few seasons.

[Inlander]

They definitely interacted with upper class (or at least upper-middle class) characters pretty regularly, but a large part of the humour of the show came from the fact that none of them - George and Kramer especially, Elaine to a lesser extent - actually "belonged" in that company and they were all hopelessly out of their depth in trying to act like they did.

[Alex C]

True enough, but the fact remains that the weird gray area between success, mediocrity, and eventually, failure is a place where the show spent an awful lot of time, particularly in the mid-to-late seasons, and as I said, Jerry is always inexplicably successful, living in an expensive apartment and cheerfully renting houses in Tuscany just to prove a point, although he admittedly does come from a decidedly middle class background. I simply don't think KvP's post is as crazy an interpretation as your post made it out to be. Ultimately, a lot of this depends on where you want to draw the line as to where one social class begins and another one ends. Remember that the most common academic interpretation of the phrase "American upper class" applies to so few people in the United States that the term is rather rarely used that way here in common conversation, since a term dedicated to the 1% megarich population is frankly pretty useless. As far as the rank and file working class here are concerned, many doctors and lawyers may as well be considered upper class.

[Inlander]

Ah. Well it's hard to remember something I'd never heard before!

We're getting into the "two nations divided by a common language" thing here. In Australia "upper class" still means something pretty close to what it means in the U.K. - namely, Old Money. From that perspective, there's a definite dissonance in trying to think of George, Jerry, Elaine, or Kramer as upper class.

[Alex C]

Dammit, US cultural imperialism should have trained you better than that.  

Yeah, when people say upper class in the US, they often mean upper middle class people rich enough to be pretty insulated from working class problems, and that fits Jerry to a T. There are definitely Old Money families in the US that hold themselves apart from the rest of us, but that's an east coast thing in many ways; in a country of 300,000,000 people, it becomes harder and harder to be culturally relevant just by sitting at home turning your nose up at mid-priced sedans. Once you start to get out west it becomes almost purely about how much cash you can throw around at any given time and whether you're a business owner as opposed to an employee. It's more about capitalism pure and simple here, with breeding being a secondary thing, racism aside.

And before anyone says anything, I'm not sure I think this is really any better of a situation than what goes on in the UK. While many of us have a looser definition "upper class", the idea that anyone can become a big player in society often just means we're that much more ready to blame the poor for being poor whether it's an accurate reading of the situation or not.

[Muppet King]

Ninjavideo currently has a pre-air of the Christmas special.

[Heliphyneau]

I love this show.  I didn't watch it when it first started because I heard people comparing it to Seinfeld and, well, I hated Seinfeld (or at least I hated Jerry Seinfeld enough to not be able to watch his show).  But IASIP is hilarious, surreal, sick -- the first two eps I actually saw, from season 4, I think, were the one where they try and take a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and the one where Charlie writes a musical.  Oh man.  I need to watch more of this show.  Sadly, I always forget when it's on.  But I have season 1 on DVD now, and I will catch up on it.

"You have to pay the troll toll . . ."

[Muppet King]

The Nightman Cometh is the finale of season four.  The road trip episode is the second episode of season five.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

what's the title of the roadtrip episode? I don't think I've seen that one and between me and my previous roomates we had every released season on dvd and watched it on tv whenever we could.

[Muppet King]

The Gang Hits the Road

[Surgoshan]

There are a bunch of episodes on hulu.

[glyphic]

What did you guys think of the episode that was an extended commercial for Dave and Busters?

[Scandanavian War Machine]

brilliant.

at first, when they were there for the first time and mentioning it by name i was like "oh god they sold out" but once the gag matured a bit, i found it to be pretty brilliant.
It was a very subtle gag in an in-your-face kind of way.  if that makes any sense

[michaelicious]

You're not gonna get a better steak in an arcade setting.

[KvP]

Anybody who's willing to associate themselves with the proprietors of Paddy's Bar deserve what they get.

[KvP]

"Upper class"? Seinfeld? Where on earth do you get that from? The four main characters ranged from lower- to "middle"-middle class, at best.

Uh, well they lived in Manhattan in spacious apartments they did not share with anyone. If that's not upper class I don't know what is.

[Scandanavian War Machine]

hopefully I can remember that there is a new episode tonight in time to tear my face away from MW2 and actually watch it.

[Alex C]

Every time I see MW2 I still think people mean Mechwarrior for at least a minute or so.

[Inlander]

"Upper class"? Seinfeld? Where on earth do you get that from? The four main characters ranged from lower- to "middle"-middle class, at best.

Uh, well they lived in Manhattan in spacious apartments they did not share with anyone. If that's not upper class I don't know what is.

See discussion above.

[E. Spaceman]

It's also important to remember that Elaine does have a roomie at least at some point and Harry's accurate mention of their misfit status when associated with rich people, the fact that they all had places was probably more of a simple plot consideration and not something to read too much into

[LeeC]

Found it!  The scene I mentioned above
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDc2L4GjXGc

[michaelicious]

Man sometimes I re-watch episodes of this show just to look at their facial expressions. Charlie's face after he says "Ghouls" for the first time is magical.