4 Reasons the Entire ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Gang Should Be Dead Already
Many It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans are amazed that their favorite show has stayed on the air for a record-breaking 19 years, but the bigger accomplishment is that its core characters have lived to their middle-to-advanced ages. Thankfully, they’re going to keep getting real weird with the time they have left.
According to series star Danny DeVito, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 17 will “get going” this September as Frank, Charlie, Dennis, Mac and Dee return to Paddy’s Pub for another series of insane schemes that would put most mere mortals in jail or in the grave. It’s long been known that bartending and bar-owning is a dangerous occupation — by some statistics, bartenders are more likely to be killed on the job than police officers — but most mixologists don’t spit in the face of their own mortality by attempting the dumbest, most dangerous stunts of any psychopaths in the City of Brotherly Love.
Every single member of the Paddy’s Pub crew should, by any logic or luck factor, have died in any number of insane circumstances, but this list is devoted to those group activities that easy could have killed all five leads on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia at once. Here are those near-death experiences in ascending order of lethality, starting with…
Gary Should Have Cut Off All of Their Heads
Seriously, I know Dee’s neighbor Gary preferred hot young blondes and no one (especially Dee) in the Paddy’s Pub gang fit the description, but when the beheading mass murderer heard five unsuspecting randos rummaging around in his apartment in “Mac Is a Serial Killer,” he should have had some kind of contingency plan to turn them all in to fridge heads. Dennis would never be caught so unprepared — he always has his tools with him.
They Should Have Died from Dehydration in the “Secret Tunnel”
In “The World Series Defense,” the gang misses the Game Six clincher of the 2008 World Series and Mac misses his opportunity to express his feelings to Chase Utley when they get trapped in the linen closet of the hotel where the Tampa Bay Rays were staying after convincing themselves that it had a secret tunnel to the stadium for the opposing players to avoid bashing by the brutal Phillies fans. Considering the entire gang had already been beaten, hit by a car, gassed with bug poison or simply smashed on riot juice by the time they got trapped in the not-dungeon, six days without proper food or water would have realistically done them in.
They Should Have Died from Delirium Tremens
In “The Gang Gets Quarantined,” Dennis forces his friends to swear off alcohol to protect their vocal cords in preparation for their Boyz II Men a cappella audition and save their immune systems’ strength, but the resulting sickness they all suffered could have been much worse than what the flu would have done to their alcohol-dependent bodies. At the end of the episode, they learned that their affliction was due to alcohol withdrawal as opposed to any kind of infection, and, for drinkers as heavy as the Paddy’s Pub crew, quitting booze cold turkey can actually be fatal.
They Should Have Drowned on That Cruise Ship
The near-drowning of the gang in the Season 11 finale “The Gang Goes to Hell: Part Two” wins the top spot for two reasons. First, the buildup to their fate-acceptance at the end of the episode was so sincere and believable that many fans still think Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton originally intended for the episode to be the last in the series with a different, more watery final scene. And, secondly, DeVito really, actually almost drowned during the filming of the episode when he couldn’t swim to the escape hatch quickly enough, later saying of the close call, “It was a good experience. I have lived a good life, and it flashed before my eyes in that scene.”