It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been around since 2005, but the process behind the show’s creation started about four years before that. With Rob McElhenney’s creative idea for what became the episode “Charlie Has Cancer,” Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day jumped on the opportunity to help develop the show. Without the influence of other sitcoms that were around at the time, though, the series might’ve ended up being far different from what we know today.
In an episode of the podcast The Three Questions with Andy Ritcher, Howerton spoke about how much 2000s sitcoms played a role in the creative development of It’s Always Sunny. Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office, in particular, were singled out as the biggest inspirations for the show’s style and overall look.
“What we thought was, you know, we want to approach this a little bit more like a drama and just have it be that the situations are so insane that that’s what makes it funny. We weren’t trying to be overly clever or overtly funny in our performance style. You know, it was really, honestly, very, very heavily influenced and spurred on by having watched the British Office and having been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. Those were the two shows that made us go ‘oh, it doesn’t have to look that good,’ you know what I mean? It just looks very handheld and it looks like somebody turned on a bunch of fluorescent lights, opened the shades and, you know, then you could roll on it if you had funny people doing funny things.”
Think back on it, those influences are clear as water in the early seasons of It’s Always Sunny. While it was definitely a step up from the homemade pilot McElhenney, Day, and Howerton created to pitch to FX, the show’s early seasons had a distinctly grubby look to it, with the executive producers doing everything they could to reduce costs. Over time, as the show’s budget grew alongside its viewership, the series naturally adopted a cleaner and brighter look. Even so, there’s no denying how much the homemade feel of it aided the comedy, giving it a classic Sunny vibe some fans have been missing in recent seasons.
If the season 16 trailer is anything to go by, it seems like the gang is going back to its roots, with a fair share of scenes clearly looking dimmed than we’ve gotten used to. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s upcoming season premieres on June 7.