Glenn Howerton, Rob Mac and Charlie Day in the season 18 premiere
of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Photo by Prashant Gupta/FX
By number of seasons, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the longest-running live-action comedy in TV history, and it’s not particularly close. The show begins its 18th season (spanning 21 years) today; no other live-action TV comedy has run more than 14.
Because It’s Always Sunny has never made more than 15 episodes in a season (most are 10 or fewer), it doesn’t have as big a library as long-running network shows like The Big Bang Theory (12 seasons, 279 episodes), Cheers (11 seasons, 275 episodes) or Friends (10 seasons, 236 episodes). But it’s getting up there: Monday’s season premiere will be episode 178 for the show. That works out to a little more than eight old-school network seasons of 22 episodes each.
It’s a pretty remarkable run, and the commitment by Rob McElhenney (or Rob Mac, as he now is credited), Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito to keeping their characters as dumb and amoral as they have been over two decades is kind of incredible. That doesn’t look to be changing this time out, to judge by the trailer and the title of the first episode: “Frank Marries a Corpse.”
A few other bits of news from late last week:
• Ahsoka will start its second season on Disney+ early next year. The announcement was part of Disney’s D23 event over the weekend, which also included a trailer for VisionQuest and, on the movie side, a first look at Ryan Gosling’s Star Wars movie Starfighter and the unveiling of the next X-Men movie’s cast.
• HBO Max renewed Stuart Fails to Save the Universe for a second season …
• … and Hulu canceled its critically acclaimed but apparently not very heavily watched dramedy Deli Boys after two seasons (which are nonetheless worth your time).
The calendar for this week is below; it’s another light one as we approach the end of summer. All times are ET/PT unless noted.