Danny DeVito Says ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Season 17 Will Be ‘Going Again’ in September, and the First 16 Were Too ‘Tame’

With every consecutive season, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has sunk to lower and lower levels of depravity than the previous episodes. But much like Dennis and his jorts, they can go lower.

It’s been 10 months since the most recent episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aired, “Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day,” which was a brilliant, Dennis-focused journey through the mind of the Golden God as he set out to lower the blood pressure and kill Elon Musk. Seeing as each new season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is just eight episodes under the show’s current contract, the wait between shortened seasons has been excruciating for longtime fans who miss the old days when seasons had 15 episodes, gaps between them were shorter and the stars/showrunners’ careers weren’t so massively successful that they had extravagant side projects holding them back from devoting their undivided attention to their cult-beloved sitcom — looking at you, Mac’s soccer team.

However, us fans must learn to accept that those old days are behind us — and, if Frank Reynolds is to be believed, those early episodes that made us fall in love with the dark, depraved and gleefully gross humor of It’s Always Sunny were just the Paddy’s Pub gang getting warmed up. During a recent red carpet interview, Danny DeVito gave the first, very welcome update on It’s Always Sunny Season 17, saying that he and his co-stars will be “going again” in September, though he admitted, “We’ve been very tame over the years, so now we can really pull out the stops, you know?” 

In other words, with whatever time It’s Always Sunny has left, they’re gonna get real weird with it.

“Now we can ruffle a few feathers, rattle a few cages, you know, shoot some fireworks,” DeVito said of Season 17, which, judging by past It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode plot lines, could be a show-by-show description rather than a slew of idioms. 

When asked what his favorite part of being on It's Always Sunny for two decades has been, DeVito answered, “We love each other, and we have a fun time being together,” then understating, “The season goes by too fast, we do eight shows or something like that in a season, it’s over before you now it, and we have fun every day. It’s really cool.”

In these shortened seasons, we’ve seen It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia start to take bigger risks and explore plot lines that are atypical and sometimes divisive among the fandom, as was the case during the multi-episode arc in Season 15 wherein the gang went to Ireland and Charlie met — and lost — his real father. Though DeVito was joking about It's Always Sunny being too tame in the early seasons, it does seem likely that he and his co-stars will push boundaries further than we thought possible back when the series was just getting started.

Who knows, maybe they’ll go to Wales this time for “The Gang Runs a Soccer Team.”