It’s been more than a year since The Gang last entertained us with some appallingly hilarious behavior, which makes the in medias res device of the 10th season premiere “The Gang Beats Boggs” such a kick. The Gang hits the ground running, or rather speeding down a runway, chugging beers in a quest to beat legendary baseball hitter Wade Boggs’ apocryphal record of downing 50 (or 60, or 70) light beers on a single transcontinental flight (and then going 3-for-5 against the Mariners). And while the conceit suffers from a touch of lazy plotting absent from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia at its best, the episode is a solid showcase for all the characters (and actors), and a welcome and promising harbinger of what’s to come in the world of—let’s say it together—the worst people in the world.
What keeps this show from becoming mere yahoo spectacle is its gleeful knowledge that its five protagonists are, indeed, the pits. Even then, the constant recalibration of audience empathy is, in the best episodes, fiendishly designed to reel viewers back onto the precipice of thinking that Mac, Charlie, Dee, Dennis, and Frank might have some redeeming qualities—before reminding us all that none of the five possess, at bottom, anything like selflessness, love, or empathy. (Charlie comes closest, but mostly due to his status as the Gang’s designated human piñata.) So when the Gang makes someone else’s life miserable, it takes some of the squirm out of their actions because, of course that’s what happens to any actual human unfortunate enough to get sucked into their orbit. And when the Gang loses, which they almost always do, it takes the sting out of their humiliation because, of course we want to see them that way. The five actors are by now so attuned to both their characters and the show’s underlying philosophy that this tightrope balancing act has come to look easy. And even when, as tonight, they wobble a bit, they still come away as unscathed as ever. Which is to say, very scathed for regular people with souls and all, but right back in the sweet spot of squalid degradation where they live.
So it makes perfect It’s Always Sunny sense that we first see the Gang boarding the plane, Dee, Dennis, Charlie, and Frank sporting plain white t-shirts with crosshatched magic marker counts of the number of beers they’ve already downed. (Mac, having lost the chugging contest that spawned the idea, has appointed himself commissioner.) The fact that this, and all of the numerous subsequent air travel no-nos the Gang commit throughout are allowed to take place for the sake of the gags is the episode’s biggest weakness—a classic It’s Always Sunny debacle always has stakes. Here, the forbearing, laissez-faire attitude of both the poor flight attendant (a nicely deadpan Emily Wilson) and the Gang’s poor fellow passengers is too flabbily conceived to heighten the comedy. (The passengers, except when called upon directly to react, just blankly ignore the grotesqueries transpiring all around them.) And while Charlie’s response to Mac’s elaborate plan to retrieve the beers he’d stowed in the cargo hold once the Gang’s finally been cut off lampshades this fact humorously (“I think you could, like, anytime—this stewardess is, like, not on the ball”), the central flaw remains.
That being said, as a simple showcase for the cast to act drunk, and gross, and hilarious, the premise does its job. Meeting the Gang already red-eyed and hammered means there’s nowhere for them to go but down, in weirder and pitch-perfectly specific directions. Dee, having rushed out to a shocking lead with 29 beers under her belt before the plane leaves the ground, gives Kaitlyn Olson all the opportunity she needs to bring the desperately competitive madness she’s so great at out into the open in pursuit of “Boss Hogg’s drinkin’ record.” As ever, Dee may have once understood the reasons why she got onto this particular self-destructive path, but, once on, it becomes all about satisfying the crazy-eyed self-worth black hole that drives her. And, as ever, her payoff comes in ultimate humiliation, her record-breaking 71st beer seeing her left, in a peerlessly ass-up comic posture, being carried on the baggage carousel into the bowels of LAX.
Dennis uses his alcohol intake to fuel his terrifyingly astute pursuit of sexual conquest, unleashing a Cumberbatch-worthy dissection of why only one of the 98 women on board is suitable to join him in the mile-high club—before settling for the low-hanging fruit of the agreeably dim “filth” (a funny turn by Jennifer Elise Cox) when things don’t go his way. Glenn Howerton continues to make the yawning chasm that is Dennis’ narcissism both very funny and deeply unsettling, epitomized by his viciously abrupt segue in describing his last-minute sexual swerve to Frank (before being interrupted by his agreeable “date,” mid-sentence):
“Boggs, he didn’t hit it out of the park every single time at bat. He just tried to get the ball in play and hope he could squeak it through the hole. And I just squeaked it through multiple holes, if you know what if saying—don’t, you.”
Frank is…Frank. As much as the paterfamilias of the Reynolds clan abets stunts like this week’s Boggs-beating journey with his wealth, and as much as TV legend Danny DeVito’s willingness (one might say “gleeful willingness”) to do all manner of gross crap for the sake of the show remains ballsy, I maintain he’s best in smaller doses. It’s Always Sunny often goes broad, but Frank is almost always the broadest element, which can get tiresome. Thankfully, apart from near-lethally drugging a fratboy (whose temerity in ordering one beer threatens Frank’s need for all the beer on the plane), Frank flames out at 19 beers, signaled by some truly copious DeVito drool.