‘The 3 Body Problem’s Creators Wrote One of the Best Episodes of ‘It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia’
One of the biggest shows in the world right now is Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, which was adapted from the acclaimed Remembrance of Earth's Past book series by showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, aka the guys behind Game of Thrones, aka arguably the last people in the world that should be adapting any more acclaimed book series.
Whether Benioff and Weiss will win back TV viewers who hated the Game of Thrones finale with a fiery passion remains to be seen, but we do want to point out that the duo also worked on another show about wildly amoral characters navigating dangerous situations: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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Apparently the Game of Thrones creators randomly met Rob McElhenney at a party and told him they were big fans of his show. According to Charlie Day, they then asked if they could write an episode of Always Sunny, were brought into the writer’s room to break the story and eventually sent back “a great script” that was one of his favorites that season.
The resulting episode was no doubt one of the show’s very best. “Flowers for Charlie” was a riff on the classic Daniel Keyes story Flowers for Algernon, in which medical researchers give Charlie a pill that will enhance his intelligence seven-fold. Or at least, it seems that way, until Charlie reveals his brilliant new invention: a device that allows cats to communicate with spiders — actually, make that “spydars.”
As McElhenney noted at the time, as veteran TV writers, Benioff and Weiss were perfectly suited to the show, even if their background wasn’t in comedy. “I think a common misconception about comedy — especially a show like ours — is that it’s just all jokes and that it’s easy to sit down and just write funny things,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2013. “Ours is a story-driven and character-driven show. It takes a specific structure to execute that, and they have that in spades.”
McElhenney then added, “I guess we’ll have to do a Game of Thrones, we’ll see.”
While the world never got an episode in which Jon Snow opens up a dive bar in King’s Landing, McElhenney did show up to make a brief cameo in Season Eight (along with Freaks and Geeks’ Martin Starr) playing a guard (not for the first time) who immediately gets his eye gouged out.
McElhenney also recommended that the Game of Thrones guys hire one of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s directors, Matt Shakman (who would later go on to helm Marvel’s WandaVision). This inspired Benioff and Weiss to pull a prank, complaining in an email to McElhenney that the recommendation was a “total disaster” when the opposite was actually true, leaving him feeling “tortured.”
So if 3 Body Problem ever gets canceled by Netflix, at least Benioff and Weiss have a backup that, it seems, may never end.
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