Rob McElhenney’s Challenge Has No Winners—But Still Awards a Prize

Rob gave the Fandom a challenge on Thursday: work out what the episode on the board is and win $100, and he gave us exactly twenty-four hours to do so. 

Unfortunately, at 5pm on Friday he announced “no one got anywhere close,” which means we’ll have to wait a couple more months to find out how Charlie Day’s cryptic notes end up being the season finale (!!news). 

So that should have been the end of that. No one got close, ah well, put on your clown noses if you were convinced you’d cracked it and take another look at Charlie’s board if you’re really that obsessed. But not me because 1) I’m stubborn with a bit of an inflated ego when it comes to knowing Sunny (even the shit that hasn’t hit our eyes yet) and 2) He tweeted this Friday evening while I was a shot of tequila and a few beers deep on an empty stomach. 

Now I’m not saying I’m convinced my friends and I got it right regardless of what Rob claims, but my drunk brain was definitely saying that. So I tweeted a reply. And I drank some more and I tweeted my thoughts, and I tweeted I think he’s lying, and I continued to drink while I tweeted some more thoughts, directly to Rob this time, and then an hour passed and I tweeted “release the s16 scripts anyway idk” and then I drank some more. And then Rob McElhenney quoted me.  

But before I go any further, let’s back up so I can explain why I drunk tweeted about a release of the Season 16 scripts in the midst of this.  

See, Thursday night when I sat down to crack the Season 17 episode, I collaborated with some friends who are just as insane about this show as I am. We spent two hours on the phone, and then another couple hours via text and Notes app to put everything together and come up with what we were pretty certain was the episode Charlie and Rob were writing. Pulling directly from Charlie’s white board, our notes ended up as follows:

1. 
   [REDACTED] with Frank
2. Clips of Frank [REDACTED] (meeting Girls? Investors?) 
   
3. Talks __ too OLD
4. Cock chews ages/info 
5. Sam Frank DATE
6. In stocio meets [REDACTED]
7. Have two of//tour visit paddy’s 
8. Dennis/Dee Sam
9. Mac/Charlie Sam
10. F gang most/meets/moment ch-
11. Dennis and Dee w/ Chew
12. Mac and Charlie w/ Chew
13. Taking last gang 
14. Dennis brings Charlie’s
15. Taking [REDACTED] Frank Begs?
16. Frank dumps Sam because she doesn’t put out 
17. F b,ing Chew / test goes wrong 
18. To stocio eruption/explanation  
19. Frank to get ___  to make up 
20. In [REDACTED] 

Which, I’ll admit, kinda seems like nonsense typed out instead of written in Charlie’s handwriting, but hear us out here, there is a way to approach this:

Drawing from connections between certain words and ideas, there’s a pretty clear thread of Frank dating a woman named Sam, with the Gang interspersed in pairings (Dennis & Dee and Charlie & Mac), and something or someone called “Chew”. Our first thought was that, given the all caps “OLD” lead in, perhaps the Gang has told Frank he’s too old to be dating and he tries to prove otherwise by dating two people at once, hence the Gang with Sam and then the Gang with Chew. And while that seemed like a solid idea, there was no real Sunny aspect we could pull from that. Aside from “Frank is old,” what’s the spoof, where’s the satirical element, what are they ripping on? There has to be something in here we’re missing…

While we ruminated on what the overall joke could be, the word “Chew” kept sticking out to us. It appears over and over, and there’s a parallel of Chew to Sam, which may mean it’s two people… but there’s differences in how Charlie Day writes the Chew parts to the Sam parts (i.e. having “w/” following M+C for Chew but not Sam), so perhaps it’s not a person but a thing. And in considering that, I threw out a joke, “Hey what if this whole episode is actually just a sponsor for BlueChew because they miss the Podcast advertisers,” and no one laughed. I clarified that BlueChew is a viagra pill just like Hims, a viagra pill they used to have as a sponsor on The Always Sunny Podcast, and while having to explain your joke is never going to make someone retroactively laugh, the funny thing is it actually led us to what the Sunny plot here could be. Maybe it is just that. A shitpost (in part) on themselves. 

Last season Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab was a spoof on the fact that Rob, Charlie, and Glenn, themselves, had recently stepped into the market of celebrity liquors. Since the whiteboard episode in question is being written by Rob and Charlie (and probably Glenn), the chance that it’s full of jokes on themselves is fairly high, and what better to rip on than the fact that 1) they advertised a viagra product on their (now dead) Podcast and 2) they’re all getting old. 

With the word “Cock” ahead of the first instance of “Chew” following the all-caps OLD being followed by Frank on a DATE, the connections began to flow:

• Sam = woman Frank is dating
• Cock Chew = BlueChew/viagra/boner pill
• Gang meets Sam and then gets involved with the Chew (pairings Dennis&Dee/Mac&Charlie have different motivations...)
• Dennis goes off with Charlie’s 
• Frank can’t test the product because Sam won’t put out
• Eruption/Climax - pills go wrong ?

And the idea basically wrote itself:

"Struggling with erectile dysfunction in his old age, Frank gets the Gang involved in a new product to enhance his sex life.”

Locked in, we tweeted our guess(es) to Rob, and as it was a group effort (and because we really didn’t care about making $100 here, this is all for the love of the game), I followed up on our submission with the following reply:

Which takes us back to the beginning of this story, explaining that one final drunk tweet in all of this, resulting in Rob’s quote tweet:

Yes, the Dropbox contains all of the Season 16 scripts (mostly Production Drafts!), which you can read here. 

So, a prize was awarded as a result of this little game, though not exactly directly. But for Rob to understand what my tweet meant means he very likely saw our submission and the reply (and maybe a few of my other drunk tweets, sorry Rob), and offered up the scripts based on that knowledge, giving us exactly what we asked for in the case in which our guess was correct. Which now begs the question: does that… in a way…perhaps somewhat…say something about our guess? Or was this just done purely out of the goodness of his heart, a consolation prize? (Or due to my persistent badgering? Or the fact that he saw I saw drunk at a bar and thought it would be funny to do it now?)

Only time can truly tell, but I do think it’ll be a shame if they never do an episode of Sunny that spoofs on their prior Podcast advertisers…especially one so pertinent to former Sunny dialogue.

But one thing is for certain, it sure will be fun to come back to Charlie Day’s whiteboard once the episode airs! (Or even once we get the synopsis…or even the Season 17 summary…)

Go enjoy those Season 16 scripts!!

-Seth

Season 16 Continues to Give

As we kind of sit around and twiddle our thumbs waiting for Season 17 information, I'm as brainrotted as ever on everything that's come before it. And as I was getting high and watching baseball Monday night, giffing scenes from this show as I tend to do, I once again questioned how Glenn Howerton has never been nominated for an Emmy, which got me thinking...the Emmys are actually kinda soon. The 2023 Emmys happening just in January, TV schedules being shortened and Summer shows being shifted due to the SAG-AFTRA and WGA Strikes has thrown off my sense of timing, but the Emmys always are, and will be, in September—which means nominations are in a month or so.

And despite the fact that we just saw the Gang at the Emmys, it wasn't as nominees, because it was one of the few years FX didn't submit Sunny, because it was one of the few years they weren't eligible. Season 16 premiered June 7, 2023, and the cut off for the 2023 Emmys was May 31, 2023, which means Sunny is instead eligible for the 2024 Emmys. So as I'm staring at Glenn Howerton's acting choices on a loop, I realize how soon nominations really are, and that means submissions have already come and gone and I haven't heard a single thing and... did they submit Sunny? 

In the past, Studios used to send For Your Consideration packages to Emmys voters with a DVD and a list of submissions. In fact, I have a few on my wall:

Since the Pandemic, however, everything has been strictly digital. This change blows if you're in love with physical media like I am (or really just see the value in physical preservation of media), but it does have its advantages in that things are submitted online, where it's obviously much easier to find information. 

So I set out on a little hunt to see if I could find FX's submissions to confirm Season 16 was listed and be able to spend a nice month daydreaming about Sunny finally getting its nomination before my dreams are ultimately crushed. And thanks to the Disney buyout (I say with a grain of salt, because the monopolization of studios is growing insanely concerning), it was pretty easy for me to navigate their sites to quickly, and happily, confirm Season Sixteen of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been submitted for consideration of an Emmys nomination. 

What does that mean for us? Not really anything at all. They've submitted every year for sixteen seasons and been snubbed every time... (not to say my eye won't be on nominations) But continue on with my story, because as I was going back to my gifs (which I still haven't posted as of writing posting this), I realized the one other advantage of everything being moved to fully-digital is that it all has to be online-accessible. But, okay, so if there's no cool physical DVD then it's just episodes that you can watch on Hulu or Cable or your personal harddrive, how's that an advantage? Well, there's one category of the Emmys that isn't dependent on voters watching any of the episodes to consider, and that's Best Screenplay. So if FX has digitally submitted the episodes to voters, they've also digitally submitted any considerations for Best Screenplay... 

Yep, that's where this is leading: Season 16 scripts are out there. Well, some are. I found only three were submitted for Best Screenplay: both RCG-written episodes and the Rob Rosell-written episode (which makes sense, I guess), but I also found Disney doesn't care enough to password protect them. So I downloaded them. And now I am sharing them with you:

Script: Celebrity Booze: The Ultimate Cash Grab

Script: Risk E. Rats. Pizza & Amusement Center

Script: The Gang Goes Bowling

Have fun, enjoy the changes (there's some good ones) and thrash a little at the deleted scenes and lines ('cause holy shit why delete THAT). Maybe link the blog as your source if you post snippets of any of the scripts.. I can't make you, cos I didn't really do anything other than find and inform... but I can offer you an egg:

Is it too late to campaign for Frank Vs. Russia to be submitted for Best Screenplay?

-Seth

Couch Math

The Gang Inflates quickly became one of my all-time favorite episodes from the moment it aired. It’s not only a great example of what Sunny’s humor is, but a hard nod to the audience that, while a lot has changed over the years and the characters are clearly growing, they’re still committed to keeping the Gang stuck in their ways. Things are “blown up” to try and spur the Gang to move forward, yet they all end up in the same place they began, proving they can’t (or won’t) move forward:

Mac and Dennis blow up a couch to replace their old one, inspiring Dennis to pitch a new business idea he has complete confidence in (despite the fact that he had just high-fived Mac over trading a ten dollar bill for a five). Mac easily proves he can’t even make good decisions for himself while Dennis proves that not only does he have terrible business sense in the market (inflatable furniture), he also has bad business sense with investments (Charlie’s TMNT pies). Charlie washes out their debt, but they’re in their mid-40s now and provenly no closer to being able to fend for themselves.

Dee’s life is blown up when she is forcibly evicted from her apartment. Displaced, she has to glue herself to the walls of the Gang’s apartments to keep from being pushed out. Frank is the only one who has given her security and it's only because he literally owns the ground she walks on. Charlie gets her back into her apartment, but she’s been with these guys for two decades and she still has to stick herself into every situation to keep from being ignored.

Charlie’s doors are blown down as Frank refuses to hear out his investment opportunity, intent on making changes in an uncomfortable way. Charlie just wants Frank to take him seriously, hear him out on his investment, but the man won’t do that, so he has to go the long route instead. His clear sense of business-talk convinces Dennis to invest, and while it immediately turns out to be seen as another ‘worthless’ Charlie investment, it actually proves that Charlie does understand business tactic (more-so, the manipulation side of things). He didn’t set out on his endeavor to trade the pies off to Frank, he wanted to go in on them together, but he uses what he’s learned in order to keep ahold of what they know—to maintain the status-quo and put everything back to how it’s always been. 

In my opinion, it’s the perfect season opener: we’re not going anywhere, and while the Gang are going to keep trying to move forward, they’re not going anywhere either. But with that being said, one thing did go somewhere this episode: my title subject—Mac and Dennis’ couch.

For as far as we know, that thing is gone for good (and, the inflatable furniture may be here to stay). And while they’re very proud of the fact that they’ve had it for so long (albeit, rented, not owned), they’re ready to move on, and have already chucked it by the time we enter the opening scene of the season. (What spurred this? I’d say it’s pretty fun to let your imagination run wild and free on that question.) What immediately struck me as interesting is the claim of longevity of their couch: fifteen years. 

You could go the simple route of chalking it up as a nod to the audience: we’re entering the sixteenth season, so they have fifteen seasons behind them, and thus “fifteen years,” with the couch, but since Season 15 made the conscious decision to keep the show in the present-day, one season = one year no longer works for the characters. So how do we figure that Mac and Dennis, as characters living in 2023, claim they’ve had their couch for fifteen years?

They’ve been roommates for well over fifteen years, but have they had their couch for longer than fifteen years? Well yes, but also no. 

Their signature black leather couch doesn’t actually make an appearance until Season 2 (Season 1 featured a three-seater, brown couch), so we can assume they got it in 2006. Now that would still put Mac and Dennis’ couch over fifteen years in 2023, until you factor in the period of time in which they definitely didn’t have their couch—Seasons 10-12. 

Thanksgiving 2013, Mac and Dennis' apartment burns down (and thus, their couch burns too) and move in with Dee for a couple of years. In the beginning of 2017, Mac restores their apartment to its exact-likeness, black leather couch included (side note: finding out they rent that thing actually makes Mac look a little less insane for being able to perfectly replace their furniture after the fire).

So they had their couch from 2006 through 2013, about eight years, and then once again from 2017 through 2023, about seven years, to bring us to:

Fifteen years, calculated by combining two periods of time broken up by major displacement, Dennis leaving and returning, a world pandemic, but it’s now that they’re moving on. This episode everyone was displaced, yet they all returned right where they began, but the couch seemingly didn’t. 

Was it simply thrown out for a plot device? Fifteen years stated only as a nod to the show’s milestone? Or is letting go of the couch telling of something further defining? Fifteen years, reached only by constantly returning and scraping together botched time, finally put behind them? Is this, being the one lasting change from the episode, a hint that Mac and Dennis are finally ready to let go of something familiar and accept something new?

Since we never physically return to their apartment in Season 16, that remains to be seen.