Rob McElhenney Gives A Worrying Update on ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Struggle With Standards and Practices

FX still isn’t happy about their flagship sitcom’s strangely sexual treatment of dogs — it’s just too bad for Dennis Jr. that the network couldn’t find their conscience back when Rob McElhenney wrote the secret recipe for Mac’s Famous Mac and Cheese.

Earlier this month, McElhenney posted a screenshot of a note that the FX Standards and Practices Department sent him during the writing of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 17 in which the censors advised that “any graphic bestiality simulation must be avoided for cuts airing both on FX linear channel & the Hulu platform.” Thanks to McElhenney’s poor understanding of Instagram’s marker tool, fans were able to easily discern that the “graphic bestiality” note referred to a “scene where Dennis shoots video footage of him masturbating a dog & when Dennis holds up a Tupperware container,” indicating that, just as Danny DeVito promised, Season 17 is going to make the previous 16 installments of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia look comparatively tame.

Two weeks passed after McElhenney admitted to some internal struggle over a harmless puppy rub ‘n’ tug before he posted an update on the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 17 struggle with the censors on his Instagram story, and this follow-up challenges the conventional wisdom that “no news is good news”:

Without seeing the revised script that McElhenney returned to the censors after they so eloquently objected to the whole “Dennis jerking off a dog into a Tupperware container” bit, it's hard to imagine what concessions (if any) the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia writing staff made to clear what we must assume to be the most important scene in the series. 

Considering that standards and practices provided no follow-up from the advisory in the original notes that read, “Please keep the semen Tupperware as generic and nondescript as possible,” perhaps the writing staff still hasn’t budged a single inch, and they’re not going to sacrifice the artistic integrity of their dog jizz joke just to avoid a sticky situation with some kitchen supply store.

The whole “Please refer to previously issued notes and cautions for this episode” line supports the theory that McElhenney and the Always Sunny writers refused to sanitize the pivotal puppy scene to appease their corporate overlords, but with McElhenney plastering crying stickers all over the rebuttal, at some point, someone is going to have to bow out of this game of censorship chicken. Given Mac’s track record when it comes to confrontation, I’d lean toward his side running away from the fight. But at the same time, it’s going to be hard for Mac to ever pass up an opportunity to watch Dennis jerk off anything.