The big question looming over Season 13 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was Glenn Howerton's level of involvement in the series, as the finale of Season 12 wrote in a plausible exit for Dennis Reynolds and Howerton's other endeavors presumably take up a good amount of his time. The above picture didn't lend much hope, unless Dennis was supposed to be the deranged axe man in the background.
Sure enough, Dennis is absent for the vast majority of the first episode, and it's evident how much the show (not to mention the Gang itself) needs him to function. The reveal that he's back (and not just in doll form) at the conclusion of "The Gang Makes Paddy's Great Again" was such a big, refreshing moment that sealed a very good premiere.
However, it's implied that Howerton's presence would be spotty, and that certainly was the case. Dennis was only present for six of the season's ten episodes, one of which was a clip show and another of which was the cameo in the aforementioned pilot. Not coincidentally, three of the four episodes in which he was absent were among the season's worst (with the finale the only exception, and we'll get to that). Particularly weak was "Charlie's Home Alone", which was interesting in concept but awful in execution, as the episode spent the first half effectively having Charlie act out scenes from Home Alone and the second half having Charlie spring gruesome and horrible traps on himself. Also horrible was the completely unfunny "The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot", in which Dee and a cast of recurring minor characters fail to recapture the magic of a classic episode. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is at its best when the core cast is playing off of one another. In isolation, none of these characters are that great.
Fortunately there were a couple winners during the season. "The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem" walked a fine line but did so effectively, as the Gang desperately tried to conclude their tangential argument with enough time to make it to a Jimmy Buffet concert for once. The running gag about the non-Dennis characters singing "The Piña Colada Song" in anticipation of Buffet playing it in concert was particularly memorable. Probably the funniest episode of Season 13 was "Time's Up for the Gang", in which the Gang attends a sexual harassment seminar that they predictably deconstruct while typically exhibiting the massive disconnect between each character's self-perception and their reality. The episode gets to the next level when it's revealed that the entire seminar was masterminded by the sociopathic Dennis, who set everything up to call out the rest of the Gang for their past misdeeds (with the irony being that Dennis has by far the most history with being a sexual predator). The formula is somewhat familiar, but it's Sunny at its finest.
Yet, without Dennis, the show must seek out a new identity, and the Dennis-less finale of Season 13 was so unlike anything we've seen before from the show. Sunny has experimented with giving actual human moments to its characters before, most notably Charlie, but the one constant is that they never treat one another like human beings; they're just five individuals stuck together by nature of their own shittiness. The weakest relationship in the group always seems to have been between Frank and Mac. It's crazy, therefore, that Sunny turns to those two for its first truly touching moment in, well, ever.
Mac's closeted (and eventually open) homosexuality had been played on by the rest of the Gang for laughs for years, but the Sunny finale shows Mac as a man who is unable to find his place and who's misunderstood by everyone from his father to his alleged friends. The first two-thirds of the episode, in which everyone continues to treat Mac like a caricature, feel intentionally bad; there's ostensibly jokes but none of them are funny or clever. But then Frank comes back to Mac one more time and says something that eventually helps Mac come out to his deranged father:
"You-you see, Mac, I've been in agony the whole day, but I came to this realization that sometimes you got to let the blood flow in order to start the healing. Some cuts you just can't plug up. That's the same for you. You got this thing inside you, and you're trying to plug it up. But you got to let that shit out. You got to let it flow. Otherwise, you're gonna be in agony for the rest of your life."What follows is a five-minute interpretive ballet dance between a woman and Mac which Mac tries to use to explain his lifelong struggles to his father. It doesn't work, but it resonates with everyone else in the room including Frank, whose epiphany ("Oh my God. I get it. I get it.") is the climax of the season. In any other episode of Sunny, there would have been some sort of joke -- that Frank was setting Mac up to punk him, that Frank's attempt at sincerity would have been misguided, that Mac's dance number would have been horrible, that Mac's dance number would have been impressive but no one cares for it anyway because it's Mac -- but it doesn't happen. There's a level of earnestness and human feeling in the last ten minutes that Sunny has never explored before, and it will be fascinating to see whether it affects the tone of the show in Season 14.
All things considered, between the heights of "Mac Finds His Pride" and "Time's Up For the Gang" and the lows of a couple of the aforementioned terrible episodes, Season 13 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was quite inconsistent. That will happen when a show partially phases out a character like Dennis Reynolds, but at least it showed that it has still has the creative capacity to put together an occasional excellent episode this deep into its run.
Episode Grades
1. The Gang Makes Paddy's Great Again: B+
2. The Gang Escapes: B-
3. The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot: D
4. Time's Up For The Gang: A
5. The Gang Gets New Wheels: C-
6. The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem: B+
7. The Gang Does A Clip Show: B-
8. Charlie's Home Alone: D-
9. The Gang Wins the Big Game: C+
10. Mac Finds His Pride: A
Season Grade: B-
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