After tonight’s new episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time,” Glenn Howerton may just break the show’s dreaded Emmys curse — though his own affliction may yet last for a thousand years.
In the newest installment of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 17, the show took a good, hard look at its own marketability among Middle Americans and found itself severely lacking. As established in last week’s episode, “Overage Drinking: A National Concern,” Frank Reynolds is now the star of The Golden Bachelor, and, in preparation for the all-important family visit that the Gang assumes will take the popular reality show to Paddy’s Pub, Dennis demands that everyone submit themselves to round after round of test screenings in front of a focus group “until finally we land on the most perfect versions of ourselves that will appear to the widest possible audiences and offend no one. That is how you make great art!”
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The greatest artistic achievement of “The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time” comes at the end of the episode when, unsatisfied with the performance of both his peers and his test audience, Dennis delivers a stirring speech that explains why he needs his appearance on The Golden Bachelor to be perfect almost as much as he needs the blood of virgins.
When the first rehearsal for the family visit garners poor test scores for Dennis and his “old face,” the Golden God responds by stretching out his skin with some face tape that gives him a look not unlike a Romanian Count who has been alive/undead since the 15th century. With each repetition of the scene, The Gang strays further and further from Dennis’ vision for the Golden Bachelor appearance that never came, and the audience becomes more and more frightened by his increasingly sinister appearance.
Finally, Dennis breaks down and explains to everyone exactly why he needs to “pop” on the mass-appeal reality show — after the humiliation he suffered in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 10 episode “The Gang Goes on Family Fight,” he cannot risk being misrepresented on low-stakes television again. Sadly for the Five Star Man, the test audience doesn’t respond as positively as he instructed, and all the rehearsals were for naught, since Frank had already recast the family’s roles on The Golden Bachelor.
However, for one long, slow scene, we got to see Howerton stretch his acting muscles as far as Dennis stretched his face, and we approached the very core of Dennis’ psyche in arguably his most (willingly) vulnerable moment in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia history. While we don’t hold out any hope that the idiot savages of the Emmy voting ranks will ever do right by Always Sunny, if they were to finally honor the greatest sitcom on television, tonight would be their cue to finally give the series, and Howerton, their flowers.
Just be sure that there isn’t any garlic hiding among the roses.
