Rob McElhenney Is Ready for His Next Quest
On a busy Los Angeles street last fall, Rob McElhenney looked up to see a young man barreling in his direction, running headlong across two lanes of treacherous Hollywood traffic to get to him. He was approximately 10 percent alarmed by this, 90 percent sure the guy was harmless: As one of the creators and stars of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, McElhenney is used to breathless fan interactions. And this was indeed a fan, eager to tell McElhenney exactly how much the FX sitcom about a ragtag gang of narcissistic deadbeats has meant to him over the years. “He was so excited,” McElhenney recalls, “and he said, ‘Man, can I just tell you, I’ve been watching you since I was a kid! My mom wouldn’t let me stay up to watch the show!’ And this guy had gray streaks in his beard.”
It’s Always Sunny has been on for fourteen seasons—long enough for fans to mature into middle age with the show (McElhenney himself is 42) and its depraved characters. For nearly fifteen years, it has remained relevant even as the way people watch TV and what they consider funny have changed dramatically. That’s a testament to McElhenney, who has a new show, Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, on AppleTV+. When I meet him at his house in mid-February, McElhenney speaks openly and at length about making comedy for this moment and about the parts of It’s Always Sunny that haven’t aged well. In stark contrast to the characters he’s created, he’s thoughtful and reflective, considering his words as carefully as his creative choices. He’s critical of himself and draws lessons from the sitcom that made him famous. And he’s making a conscious effort to apply these lessons to both It’s Always Sunny and Mythic Quest—to ensure that he’s surrounded by writers with diverse points of view and comes up with jokes that never punch down—so he can continue pushing the limits of comedy.
“Forget that it’s morally the right thing to do; it’s also more fun to write,” he tells me on an unusually chilly L.A. afternoon, stoking a fire inside the sleek, tree-surrounded den he uses as a home office. “Otherwise, you’re just stale. You’re stale and old, and the young people are gonna wait till you die before they take over, as is the right of every generation.”
Having hit a home run with his very first show—It’s Always Sunny is now tied with “Ozzie & Harriet” as the longest-running series in FX history—McElhenney was not about to rush into picking a sophomore project. When a software behemoth came knocking a couple of years back, proposing that he make a show about the gaming industry, he was skeptical. For one thing, he’s not a gamer. “My first thought was ‘No thanks’,” he admits. “It wasn’t a world that I knew that well, and what I did know about it was in a pretty negative light through pop culture, basically like the comic book guy in The Simpsons.” Even for someone who thrives on writing about socially maladjusted knuckleheads, this didn’t appeal. But the company was persistent enough that he agreed to visit their studio, where he was introduced to an executive. When McElhenney asked the executive what he did, "He took a moment, looked to the heavens with this very pregnant pause, and then turned back to me and said: ‘I build worlds.’” McElhenney excused himself, stepped outside, and immediately called Charlie Day, his longtime partner on It’s Always Sunny, to tell him he’d found their next show.
Mythic Quest, which launched earlier this month, centers on the staff of an epic fantasy game whose pompous, self-mythologizing leader, Ian Grimm (McElhenney), echoes the software executive. “The thing is, he’s not wrong!” McElhenney emphasizes. “They really are building worlds, and people from all over the globe spend their days in these worlds.” He, Day, and their co-creator, Megan Ganz, were drawn to the underdog quality that comes from the fact that video games are both hugely lucrative and culturally invisible—the most recent iteration of Grand Theft Auto grossed more money than any movie ever made, yet its creators have zero name recognition outside of the gaming world. “The idea that this piece of entertainment is consumed on such a massive scale creates a certain amount of ego, but then the lack of notoriety and lack of respect from the general public also creates a real chip on the shoulder. That struck us as an interesting place to position a show.” And though the gaming industry is infamously white- and male-dominated, the cast of Mythic Quest is diverse, and McElhenney made a point of surrounding himself with “young writers and young actors. I’m an old man in the writers’ room, and I think of myself as a pretty progressive lefty liberal, but sometimes by the end of these conversations I feel like I’m an archconservative! I don’t always agree, but if I just shut the fuck up and listen, nine times out of ten I can at the very least understand their perspective.”
McElhenney shares this newly built home with his wife and It’s Always Sunny costar, Kaitlin Olson, and their two children. It’s a sprawling, bespoke stunner in a serene neighborhood, a far cry from the “garage in West Hollywood” where McElhenney resided when he moved here eighteen years ago. In that converted garage, he lived out the classic aspiring-actor scenario: waiting tables, auditioning all the time, booking nothing. One night, lying in bed and questioning his choices, “I just had this idea of a scene where somebody admits to their friend that they have cancer, and all that friend wants to do is get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.” There was something in the callousness of it, the juxtaposition of friendship and narcissism, that intrigued him. “I knew it was dark, and I knew if I explained it to anybody they probably wouldn’t see the comedy in it, so I just had to write it.”
McElhenney was a fan of Friends, which was nearing the end of its run at the time, and liked the idea of writing its antithesis. “The thematic fabric of that show is ‘I’ll be there for you,’ and I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to do a show about a group of friends who will never be there for each other? They will actively try and find reasons to distance themselves from each other, but they can’t because they’re stuck together.” He also realized he did know two people who might see the comedy in this anti-buddy sitcom—“one was the funniest person I’ve ever met, Charlie Day, and one was one of the greatest actors I’ve ever met, Glenn Howerton.” He fleshed out the cancer scene into what became the prototype for It’s Always Sunny and cast himself, Day, and Howerton as the central trio.
On the strength of two test episodes that the trio filmed in their apartments, FX ordered a seven-episode first season and even agreed to McElhenney’s stipulation that he (“a twenty-five-year-old waiter”) be the showrunner, which a lot of others balked at. “But they didn’t pay us enough to quit our night jobs. I was still working at the restaurant when we made the first season.” After season one, the ratings were so low that FX president John Landgraf called with an ultimatum: Bring in a star, specifically Danny DeVito, or the show will be canceled. Though DeVito’s Frank has become an indispensable part of the ensemble, McElhenney was reluctant. “It was nothing against Danny, but when you bring in a major star to act with a bunch of unknowns, you have no idea how it’s going to change the dynamic. Lo and behold, it made the show what it is.”
Another FX note that ended up defining the show was a location shift from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. The original plan was for the gang to be aspiring Hollywood types, but at the time there was already a glut of upcoming series set in that world—Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the short-lived Friends spin-off, Joey. McElhenney was born and raised in Philly, and he leaped at the chance to set the show closer to home. “I also loved the idea that it was Philly, the City of Brotherly Love, and that’s the complete opposite of what we were doing.”
Despite the lack of traditional brotherly love among the gang, It’s Always Sunny has amassed a dedicated fan base in large part because people see themselves in its egotistical protagonists. “No one else will have them, and there’s a certain sweetness to that,” McElhenney suggests, adding that he’s lost count of how many times fans have told him that the gang is “just like their friend group.” It would be disturbing, if he didn’t understand the subtext. “It’s not about the actions of the characters; they’re talking about the dynamic and the chemistry. The reason we’ve been able to do this for fourteen years is because we all love each other, and it’s clear.” A lot of casts talk insincerely about how they’re just one big happy family, but “we are literally a family. We’re all married to each other and having children with each other!” Day is married to Mary Elizabeth Ellis, aka It’s Always Sunny’s deliberately unnamed Waitress, while McElhenney and Olson got married in 2008 after dating for a couple years. “The dynamic never really changed,” he says. “We just, outside of work, started to fall in love. Dating, getting married, becoming parents, those can be tricky waters to swim in when you’re working together, but because in those first few years we had already developed such a strong working relationship, the paradigm was already there.”
When I talk to Day about their creative partnership, he jokes that the dynamic works so well because McElhenney “kicks me in the ass when I need it. I owe Rob a debt of gratitude, because he’s the most ambitious and driven person I know. We have plenty of arguments, but they’re creative arguments rather than ego arguments.” Still, sustaining any show for that many seasons is a tall order, especially because McElhenney is so determined never to coast. “We’re always trying to justify why we’re still doing the show after fourteen years,” he admits, adding that every year he and Day go through a checklist: Is the show still fun to make? Is the audience still there? Are they becoming lazy or derivative? Are they pushing themselves creatively? It’s the last question, he says, which inspired an extraordinary turn the show took in its season thirteen finale. “One thing that Sunny very rarely does is explore real, heartfelt expressions of emotional truth”—and so, in the name of creative risk-taking, season thirteen ended with McElhenney’s Mac coming out to his incarcerated father through a remarkable five-minute interpretive-dance sequence set to a Sigur Rós ballad.
Mac’s ambiguous sexuality (as juxtaposed with his ultraconservative Catholic values and rampant homophobia) had been a joke since the show began, but over the years it started to gnaw at McElhenney. “It came partially from recognizing the lack of diversity in the show, which was something unfortunately we just had zero consciousness of at the time,” he says frankly. “An important distinction that I think we try to make in Sunny—and don’t necessarily always succeed—is that for as homophobic or racist or ignorant or terrible as the characters are, I think it’s clear that the people behind the show are not. And where we have blind spots, we try to ameliorate or at least recognize them.” A case in point is the character of Carmen, a trans woman who was introduced early in season one. “[The characters] were calling her a slur during the first few years, which was most definitely out of ignorance. It was never supposed to be inflammatory or hurtful, but nevertheless, it was. We can’t go back and re-edit those episodes, but what we can do is make sure that as we’re moving forward, we’re making those adjustments and doing our due diligence.” Though the writers made a point of bringing Carmen back and course-correcting, McElhenney knew they needed to find an organic way to introduce more representation, “not even for any kind of political correctness, just because it felt like the show was starting to get stale, and like it was from a bygone era.”
After season eleven ended with a bait-and-switch in which Mac briefly comes out, then takes it back, McElhenney had a moment of reckoning prompted by backlash. “That was around the time I was getting involved in social media for the first time, and the response from fans was resolute,” he recalls, wincing. “And it was from a subset of our audience that I didn’t really even know existed.” He’d never necessarily thought of the show as a place people went to feel seen; he figured fans watched it to unwind, that it was “something people talk about with their friends or smoke a joint and mindlessly fall asleep to.” Instead, he realized, “there were people that we had truly disappointed, members of the Sunny community who thought maybe this character was representing them, and when he came out and then immediately took it back, it was really upsetting to them.” Even now, years later, his guilt is palpable. “I was raised partly in the gay community,” he explains. His mother came out when he was eight years old, and his two younger brothers are also gay. “Although in some ways I was an outsider in that community, I was always welcomed and made to feel included, and that’s what made the response heartbreaking. I realized we were hurting people.”
After the blowback, McElhenney went to Day and Howerton to suggest that Mac’s next coming out needed to be permanent while keeping with the show’s tone. “It was so important that he didn’t suddenly become a choirboy just because he’d finally released the demon that had been on his shoulders for so many years,” McElhenney says. Real representation has to permit characters from any marginalized group to be as flawed, selfish, and shitty as anyone else, and particularly in the cynical It’s Always Sunny universe, pandering would stick out. “How do we do this in a way that’s still true to the character, where he can still be just as big of a piece of garbage as he always has been?” For the moment in which Mac comes out to his father, a convicted felon who is decidedly not woke, McElhenney also knew he wanted to do something that truly scared him. Every aspect of the dance—from its physical challenge to its emotional vulnerability to its hard pivot from the show’s usual attitude—felt risky, and therefore appealing.
McElhenney is not a dancer and has never been one, and he understood that pulling off the sequence would take months of rigorous training. It was a gesture of love to the LGBTQ+ community, and he wanted to earn it. The work paid off: Critics hailed the scene as a “stunning,” “jaw-dropping” creative high for the series, which was less significant to McElhenney than the responses from queer fans who finally felt seen. “Just thinking about the community itself, and how important they've been to my entire existence,” he says, his voice cracking a little, “I knew that if I could do something as small as dancing on a dick-and-ball-show basic-cable late-night comedy and if it would mean anything to anybody, then I would be willing to put in the four months of work to get the four minutes of screen time, because that’s what they’re owed.”
A few days after my conversation with McElhenney, I pay a visit to the Mythic Quest writers’ room, in which the staff is already breaking story for the last episodes of season two. The lack of any imposed hierarchy in the room is striking; McElhenney spends at least as much time listening as he does talking to his writers, many of whom are also cast members. “I think it must be that they exorcise all their demons within the show,” Ganz jokes about McElhenney and Day. “There’s no misogyny, there’s no egos happening, which is so funny because on the show, the characters are never not screaming at each other.” There’s a fifty-fifty gender split on the Mythic Quest staff, which McElhenney emphasizes was not intentional–“we looked for the best writers with POVs that aligned closely with the characters in the show, and this is just how it worked out.”
When Ganz joined the writing staff of It’s Always Sunny in 2016, having previously worked on sitcoms including Modern Family and Community, “it was the first show I’d been a part of where I wasn’t treated like ‘a female writer,’ where I was just treated like a writer and a collaborator and a peer. I didn’t quite realize how much I needed that until I got it. There was a time when I really thought about leaving the industry, because of experiences that I’d had on Community and other shows. It was bad.” By contrast, she says, McElhenney is the only showrunner she’s encountered who “gives me credit for things I didn’t do. Literally, I’ll be like, ‘No, Rob, you did that thing.’ To be a person who can have enough ego to stand at the front of a project and make it happen but also treat everyone with decency and respect and appreciation for their time, that’s huge.”
Since none of the creators had much gaming expertise, they brought in an array of developers and specialists to find out what issues the industry has been facing. One of the biggest—the rise of hate speech on gaming platforms—inspired an early episode in which the MQ team realizes that the fantastical world it’s built doubles as a social-media platform where white supremacists congregate. “That was something that came up a lot in talking to experts, just the immense amount of toxicity in the community and the way that players are communicating,” McElhenney says. “How do the tech companies manage that? It turns out they’re not doing a very good job at it, and it’s wreaking havoc on our entire culture.” On Mythic Quest, the team dreams up the elegant solution of confining the white supremacists to a literal online echo chamber in which they can spew vitriol only at one another. “They didn’t ban anybody. They’re still allowing them to exercise their free speech, except now they have to just do it with each other so they can’t indoctrinate anybody else.”
In discussing this episode, we’ve returned to the broader subject of how to take risks in comedy without doing harm, and of how McElhenny works to avoid falling into his own echo chambers. “I’m in my forties, and I’ve lived a certain way my whole life with certain understandings of the world that are just being shattered now,” he reflects. “And you need to be open to it. You’ve constructed the world through the prism of your own perspective, and it’s gotten you this far. But if you don’t keep learning, if you get defensive, you’re just going to stay in stasis for the rest of your life.”
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