Rob McElhenney Says He Forced the ‘Abbott Elementary’ Cast to Curse on ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’
On a very special episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Paddy’s Pub Gang is going to give the teachers of Willard R. Abbott Elementary School a crash-course in colorful vocabulary.
The most highly anticipated sitcom crossover event in the history of Philadelphia has an unusual but brilliant format devised by Abbott Elementary creator and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia superfan Quinta Brunson. Instead of picking one series for the two shows to join forces upon and subject the fans of the visiting team to unfamiliar camera angles and editing decisions, both Abbott and Always Sunny get a turn with the crossover, first in the Abbott midseason premiere “Volunteers” that released earlier this month and then in a yet-untitled Always Sunny episode that will air during the show’s upcoming 17th season this June.
Don't Miss
That means that, after forcing the Paddy’s Pub Gang to self-censor to fit in the TV-PG constraints and save some students from emotional scarring, Brunson and her co-stars will take a walk on the TV-MA side with all the unbridled vocabulary and graphic scenes featuring dog masturbation that come with it.
During Rob McElhenney's appearance on the Wednesday night episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia star and creator warned Abbott Elementary fans who are still too scared to venture over to the dark side of Hulu that Janine, Jacob and maybe even Ms. Barbara Howard herself will soon have to use some four-letter words that won’t show up in the school spelling bee.
“The way that we looked at the episodes is that we shot the same story from two different perspectives,” McElhenney explained of the crossover’s conceit, then understating, “Abbott has a very specific family tone, Sunny has a very specific un-family tone. But we thought it would be interesting if we told the same story, except told through the prism of each individual tone.”
Kimmel then asked his guest, “So we won’t see the characters from Abbott Elementary cursing and being deplorable, will we?”
“Oh,” McElhenney relished, “yes we will.”
McElhenney explained that, since the cast of Always Sunny paid their dues and their debt to society while pretending to be upstanding citizens, it’s now their turn to make the working stiffs of West Philly sink to the South Philly level. “Well, we had to play nice on their show, and we got them to play bad on ours,” McElhenney puckishly teased.
Even if they may have personal objections to the obscene language of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Abbott Elementary characters should count their blessings that they only have to play bad, not play CharDee MacDennis.
