Russia Tried to Make Its Own Awful ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Knockoff Called ‘It’s Always Sunny in Moscow’

For a country that proclaims American culture to be downright cancerous, Russia sure loves to turn our most beloved TV shows into an experience equivalent in entertainment value to a tumor biopsy.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with stereotypes to learn that comedy writing, and, more specifically, sitcom creation, isn’t a natural talent of the Russian people. As such, Russian TV stations must import their comedies from abroad and repackage them with a domestic cast and crew in the hope that some small fraction of the humor makes it through the language and talent barriers. In fact, one of the most successful Russian sitcoms of all time isn’t even Russian — it’s an adaptation of Everybody Loves Raymond titled Voronin’s Family, which holds the Guinness World Record for the longest adapted television show in the world with 552 total episodes, more than double the number of the American original.

So, when the Russian TV Network TNT (no relation) secured the domestic rights to adapt It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for Ruski comedy fans in 2014, they probably believed that it was impossible to screw up a sitcom about a bunch of stumbling drunks so bad that a country full of them wouldn’t watch it. Well, It’s Always Sunny in Moscow barely made it a single season before getting chased out of the country like it was Napoleon in mid-December.

Sadly, TNT scrubbed almost every trace of It's Always Sunny in Moscow from the internet after its catastrophic failure on local television, but the above analysis from YouTuber Ella Dumpsterfire offers an insight into the bizarre creative decisions made by the Russian showrunners. 

Each episode of It’s Always Sunny in Moscow took a random storyline from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and attempted to localize it while struggling to keep the plot coherent or slightly entertaining. For some reason, the actions and character traits assigned to the original cast are nonsensically distributed among the Russian roles, which means that Charlie, not Mac, is the one in desperate need of a father figure, Dee pooped the bed instead of Frank, and Dennis banged Charlie’s prom date instead of Mac banging his.

As Dumpsterfire points out and many other surviving reviews of the series similarly reflect, It’s Always Sunny in Moscow relied heavily on bizarre, unfunny and ultimately meaningless montages to fill out its runtime, and the series is laden with grating music cues that completely distract from the scenes they score. In fact, most of the editing and directorial decisions that shaped each episode of It’s Always Sunny in Moscow seem like they were made by someone who had never once watched the original Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or even any previous episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Moscow, but who believed that their audience could be pacified with a barrage of disconnected visual gags set to the most ear-bleedingly awful music in the Eastern Hemisphere.

However, It’s Always Sunny in Moscow did make one change that deserves appreciation. In the Russian version of the show, Dennis and Dee’s birth father, the Bruce Mathis character, isn’t some altruistic super dad who is too good for his awful children — instead, their real father is an evil manipulative creep who everyone hates. The only misstep the Russians made in this recharacterization was that they didn’t convince the self-admitted pedophile Stephen Collins to reprise the role — though he may not have been allowed to leave the country at the time.