Rob McElhenney Reveals The Unique Spin That 'Always Sunny' Will Use On Its 'Abbott Elementary' Crossover

When It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia airs its episode featuring the main cast of Abbott Elementary in June, it’s going to give the ABC mockumentary the Blair Witch Project treatment.

Back on January 8th, the Abbott Elementary midseason premiere “Volunteers” told the story of Willard R. Abbott Elementary School’s first unpaid helpers as they visited the underfunded Philadelphia public school and contributed their talents to the week’s curriculum. Of course, since those volunteers were the Paddy’s Pub Gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, only Mac ended up being of much use as he became Principal Ava Coleman’s personal assistant/servant, while Dee tried desperately to bang Gregory, Charlie sort of learned to read, Frank ate flavored dirt and Dennis did… something.

As Abbott Elementary producers have already confirmed, the Always Sunny side of the crossover special will heavily feature Dennis Reynolds, who didn’t consent to the diegetic documentarians at Willard R. Abbott capturing his likeness on the grounds of a public school and who spent most of the episode skulking off-screen. Now, Always Sunny star and creator Rob McElhenney has revealed that the Always Sunny episode starring the Abbott crew will be a “found footage”-style cutup of all the latter show’s film crew that were too dark to make the TV-PG cut.

In a conversation with TheWrap, McElhenney unveiled a few more details about how he and the Always Sunny team went about telling their side of the story first laid out by the Abbott crew in “Volunteers,” saying, “It’s the same story just seen through the prism of the ‘Sunny’ characters and the found footage that they weren’t allowed to use while making the show.”

McElhenney reiterated what his Abbott colleagues already revealed about the focus of the Always Sunny crossover episode, saying that his take on the plot line will “most definitely” feature whatever Dennis was doing while trying to avoid Abbott’s in-universe documentary crew.

Knowing that the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will edit their very special episode out of the footage filmed by the Abbott Elementary crew, we can take this to mean that Dennis didn’t do as good a job at hiding from the cameras as we initially thought while watching “Volunteers.” However, since the Always Sunny episode will feature all the found footage that was inadmissible for the Abbott doc confirms that, whatever Dennis was doing, must have been very, very dark.

Dennis is about to make someone stand in the corner, isn’t he?