On the GoodOnePodcast, GlennHowerton and Charlie Day discuss AlwaysSunny's writing process, why it was time for Charlie Kelly to meet his father, and how they resolved the last season's biggest disagreement
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Patrick McElhenney/FX It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been running strong for 15 seasons. The last season, which aired on FX in December and is currently available on Hulu, made it the longest-running live-action sitcom in TV history. More than that, Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, and Charlie Day have been working on it in one form or another for 18 years.
Glenn Howerton: I took two years almost completely out of the writers’ room — seasons 13 and 14. Our process is we break stories with the room and then we assign drafts. Then the drafts go off and we give notes. We get it as close as we can with the writers. And the final step is the three of us do what we call an “RCG” pass.
On having Charlie meet his dad G.H.: Charlie had a story line over many, many seasons about not knowing who his father is and thinking that it’s Frank, and we kind of left that question dangling. So it was about tapping into an emotional core of the thing. Correct me if I’m wrong, Charlie, but him thinking that it was his brother was just a way of making it more surprising when you learn that it’s his father. We thought it was a nice misdirect. It’s like, Oh, that’s cool.
C.D.: I was like, I know this is going to be funny if he’s talking to the castle. And Glenn and I were leading in this direction, and Rob had a different idea. But the fight was less about the scene. The fight was about process. Rob had written it a certain way, and I was talking to Glenn and I was like, “Look, I think we should do this a different way.” So Glenn and I wrote the talking-to-the-castle scene, and we talked to Rob, and Rob liked his direction. But he was sort of giving up on it.
G.H.: I mean, he would probably still say that it was a little bit of a lateral move. It’s not that he didn’t like what we were doing.G.H.: But that’s our opinion. And I, by the way, I totally agree with you. I stand by that. I don’t think what he wanted to do was going to work at all. I think it was going to feel derivative.
C.D.: Every single season, we have a little therapy session midway through the season where we sit down and we hash some shit out. It’s always pretty much the same conversation, which is basically like that scene we’re talking about. It was not really about the scene; it was about the buildup of tensions leading up to the scene. You’re navigating personalities and creative ideas. You have a ticking clock, so there’s the pressure of that.
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