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It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 15 Review

The fifteenth season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is such an unexpected delight. The show is the strongest it’s been in quite a while.

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“I don’t know, I haven’t been Dutch long enough“

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Finally, one of my favorite comedy shows is back after a hiatus during the dumb pandemic. You’d think that this pause and a change of scenery would hurt the show, but thankfully you’d be mistaken as it turned out to be the best season in a long time. It’s just a shame that the episode count was reduced from ten to eight, but other than that only had some minor quibbles with the season.

2020: A Year in Review is among the weakest episodes of this season. It’s actually much better than I thought it would be given its politics-heavy premise, but still I prefer Sunny episodes that aren’t a social commentary. Still though, the highlight was that poor man listening to their wild stories about the election and the voting. The twist that they supported Kanye instead of Trump was hilarious.

The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7 brings back this hilarious tradition of the gang filming these ridiculous movies and the results are as funny as always. This is again a heavily politically-charged episode, but it fits the characters’ personalities and it was very amusing how they still ended up offending racial minorities despite their best efforts not to.

The Gang Buys a Roller Rink is one of the season’s highlights. I don’t care if it breaks the canon or not, I only care for funny stories in comedy shows and this is a very funny episode. Taking the gang back to 1998 through flashbacks produced a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, but the biggest revelation was that Charlie actually invested the most in Paddy’s Pub and the others tricked him in a very amusing manner. The origin of Dee’s awfulness was silly, but entertaining, and the final gag that the pub remained the same through all these years was terrific.

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The Gang Replaces Dee with a Monkey finds Dee in very funny form. She is always at her best when pursuing an acting career. The bits with the monkey were amazing too with the highlight being the brisk gag that hints at Mac apparently enjoying being raped in the mouth by this crazy monkey.

The Gang Goes to Ireland made this season the first ever to take the gang to a whole other place and country. And I thought this would break the season, but the opposite happened as Ireland is fitting for the characters’ heritage. Frank being in the know about Epstein and all of these horrible predators in Hollywood was also fitting for the character and Dennis basically becoming Vincent Price as this creepy master of the castle was great.

The Gang’s Still in Ireland is all about Mac’s identity crisis. Is he gay or Catholic or Irish or badass first? He is just Mac as the gang says and through this the team cleverly satirized the ridiculousness of the whole identity politics movement now brewing in the west while staying true to his character. Mac is once again among the MVPs of the season.

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Dee Sinks in a Bog is particularly funny in Dee’s moments with Waitress. This is a more intimate season that did not feature anybody from the supporting cast except for Waitress and she was great as always. The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain ended Charlie’s Irish storyline beautifully. It’s a surprisingly emotional episode that sees Charlie carry his newfound Irish father to push the body from the cliff. Colm Meaney was great as his dad and how he died was very funny.