This Is the First ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Episode to Take Place Entirely in Paddy’s Pub

Generally speaking, Philadelphia is a safer place when the owners and employees of Paddy’s Pub stay in their dive bar instead of coming up with schemes that involve the general public. But sometimes, the schemes come to Paddy’s.

Honestly, you’d think that, the longer It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia runs and the older Dennis, Dee, Mac, Charlie and Frank grow, they’d reach a point in their middle-to-old-ages when they’d all grow tired of constantly dragging themselves and each other all across the city for their latest dangerous and exhausting experiment in degeneracy. With a median age of 48 years old, the Paddy’s Pub gang should be perfectly fine with slouching over the stools of their own bar and staving off the shakes indoors each week. However, in recent seasons, the gang has only grown more adventurous — such as when they spent half of Season 15 finding their roots in Ireland.

There are only six episodes in the history of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that exclusively take place in, around or on top of Paddy’s Pub, the first of which was Season Three’s “The Gang Gets Held Hostage.” It’s funny how, in the first-ever bottle episode of a show about a bunch of alcoholics running a bar, the bottle in question was full of milk.

In “The Gang Gets Held Hostage,” the vengeful McPoyle brothers (along with their mute, unibrowed sister Margaret) invade Paddy’s Pub with guns blazing and torment their perennial enemies with the heat turned all the way up. Frank’s Die Hard-inspired B-plot helps to foil the takeover, with the gang eventually discovering that the guns were fake and the entire event was some nonlethal revenge by humiliation, which, thanks to Dee’s Stockholm syndrome, was ample.

While most sitcom bottle episodes are made with the intention of scaling back production budgets and telling a small-scale, character-focused story, “The Gang Gets Held Hostage” is patently the opposite. The mortal stakes coupled with the increasing insanity of the entire cast make “The Gang Gets Held Hostage” the most explosive and eventful bottle episode in sitcom history, and certainly the strangest of Always Sunny so far.

The other Always Sunny episodes that only take place at Paddy’s are “The Gang Dances Their Asses Off” from the same season, “Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games” in Season Seven, the Season 10 episode “Charlie Work,” “The Gang Tends Bar” in Season 12 and “The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem” in Season 13. But for my money, you can’t beat Sweet Dee grabbing a shotgun, Liam licking her across the face and then Dee attempting to blast her a-hole brother and his buddies hard and fast – but not in a sexual way.