Exclusive It's (Almost) Always Sunny In Philadelphia book excerpt reveals how creators sold the show with a VHS

Fox executives emphatically did not understand the pitch, according to Kimberly Potts' new book.

By Jen Lennon | June 25, 2025 | 4:45pm

Books News It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

Exclusive It's (Almost) Always Sunny In Philadelphia book excerpt reveals how creators sold the show with a VHS

When It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia premiered in 2005, no one would have guessed that it would go on to become the longest-running live-action sitcom in American history. The series follows friends Mac (Rob McElhenney), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Charlie (Charlie Day), and Dee (Kaitlin Olson), collectively known as “the Gang” (with the later addition of Danny DeVito’s Frank), as they run a dive bar in South Philadelphia. It’s less about the bar, though, and more about the Gang’s deranged interactions with each other and the outside world. The Gang is gleefully unlikable, they never learn or grow, and that’s the point.

In her new book, It’s (Almost) Always Sunny In Philadelphia: How Three Friends Spent $200 To Create The Longest-Running Live-Action Sitcom In History And Help Build A Network (out July 1), Kimberly Potts traces the history of the show, from all the major networks passing on McElhenney, Howerton, and Day’s pitch to its unlikely success 20 years later. In this exclusive excerpt, Potts details how McElhenney sold the show with just a VHS tape and his uncanny charisma.

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The whole project began with a dream and McElhenney’s ambition pushing his friends toward a creative endeavor, the results of which he now carried on a single VHS tape. He was ready for the pitch meetings Ari Greenburg had arranged, ready to show TV executives what he and his friends had done and could do. The VHS tape as the delivery method of their creativity was certainly not going to make anyone in an executive suite see the It’s Always Sunny on TV gang as fresh or cutting-edge, but it did have a well-thought-out purpose. Shiny silver DVDs, like the one holding the footage of the two Sunny shorts, copied directly from McElhenney’s laptop, had a nasty habit of randomly refusing to play in DVD players. McElhenney had seen it happen on his own with a disc of the Sunny shorts he’d burned as a screening for friends at Howerton’s apartment. Worst of all, he’d heard about such nonfunctioning DVDs ruining other Hollywood pitch sessions. Of all the things he could worry about going wrong at any of these meetings—though he was actually a confident, glass-half-full kinda guy by nature—a skipping or totally nonplaying DVD was not going to be one of them. Hence the VHS tape in its unlabeled original cardboard box, which he ferried to more than half a dozen meetings across a couple of days.

McElhenney had one objection to the idea of a pitch meeting: he didn’t want to have to pitch. He didn’t want to go into those network offices filled with television executives who thought they’d seen it all and try to persuade the skeptics that he and his inexperienced collaborators were going to bring something different to TV land. He and Howerton and Day made It’s Always Sunny on TV to show they had something special to offer. So McElhenney intended to simply insert the tape into the VCRs, hit play, and wait for the laughing to commence.

It was a brash decision for someone who was lucky to get such a lineup of networks interested in the first place. Twenty-five-year- old actors, with little writing experience, no credits as producers or showrunners, and deleted minor performances in two movies (The Devil’s Own and Wonder Boys) as their most impressive acting ré-sumé entries don’t usually/often/ever have the opportunity to sell their idea for a comedy series with no known cast members to MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, HBO, CBS, Fox, and FX, all in two short days. It was only the influence of Ari Greenburg that made those meetings happen.

Back in 2004, Greenburg, now the president of the William Morris Endeavor (WME) agency, was an Endeavor agent with an impressive track record of “packaging,” or putting together the elements of TV series. He helped make The Osbournes a seminal reality program for MTV, and was also responsible for Without a Trace, The O.C., Prison Break, and Veronica Mars—all series that became hits. Greenburg would go on to package dozens of other shows, including This Is Us, Heroes, Supernatural, Westworld, Riverdale, Once Upon a Time, Bob’s Burgers, Arrow, and The Flash, and set up huge deals for the likes of Dick Wolf and Greg Berlanti, two of TV’s most prolific producers.

Greenburg particularly connected with McElhenney on a personal level. Yes, he liked It’s Always Sunny on TV and thought it was a very funny show with a lot of potential. But he also, like McElhenney, grew up in Philadelphia, and they both had dreams of making it big in Hollywood but were seen as underdogs to do so.

When Greenburg began interviewing for jobs after his Berkeley graduation, he was excited to land a meeting with a human resources executive at International Creative Management (ICM), one of the industry’s biggest talent agencies. Greenburg’s ultimate goal was to run a broadcast television network, and he was certain a spot in ICM’s agent-training program would be an important first step to his dream destination as one of TV’s top decision-makers. But before he could make it through the interview, the executive shared a crushing opinion: Greenburg didn’t have the makings of a Hollywood agent.

Actually, that review would have crushed a less committed and ambitious young talent. Greenburg instead let it fuel him to become an agent at a different firm, working his way up from phone-answering assistant gigs to junior agent to TV packaging guru and all the way to president of WME. He saw that same kind of commitment and ambition and intelligence in his fellow Philadelphian, and that was a major factor in Greenburg’s decision to take McElhenney and his homemade pilot around town to network development executives.

So, instead of making a formal pitch with a series bible, plans for episodes into season 5, and a big speech about why a prestigious cable network should let three twentysomething guys who spent $200 on a DIY pilot run a series with a multimillion-dollar budget, McElhenney, Frenkel, and Greenburg would walk into executive offices, shake hands, make introductions, exchange a few pleasantries, slide the pilot VHS tape into the office player, and watch along with the people who decided what was on the nation’s TV screens.

Would they laugh alongside these newcomers, clearly getting the dark humor, and then say they wanted to be in the Rob McElhenney– Glenn Howerton–Charlie Day business? Or would they nod politely and shake hands once again as they walked the trio out the door— carrying the complimentary bottles of water and copies of Variety they’d been given—and have the assistant sitting outside the boss’s office possibly offer to validate their parking?

For McElhenney—who was taking these meetings without his partners because his energy and confidence made him a born salesman (“He can sell you your own pants,” Howerton said) and because Howerton and Day were more than happy to skip the business part of what went into a television show—it turned out to be a bit of a Goldilocks situation.

HBO and VH1 passed immediately, politely, in that showing-you-to-the-door kind of way.

MTV and Comedy Central liked the short videos enough to make offers, but neither of them were willing to let the guys continue on as the series’ creative forces. That, of course, was a deal-breaker.

“‘If you like what you’re seeing, and you want us to keep doing it, then this is the process through which we did it,’” McElhenney said, explaining how he tried to reason with the executives. “Why would you change that? You know, [they] were like, ‘We’re not buying what you’re saying. We like the show, but you’re a waiter. With all due respect, we can’t have a waiter step in and run this show.’ ”

CBS executives liked the show, but it was their opinion that the humor was not a good fit for the more buttoned-up demographic of the Eye Network.

And at the meeting with the Fox executives, there were no laughs whatsoever. Not a single snicker or snort in the room.

“They did not get it,” McElhenney said. “It was the only room that did not laugh once. I was just looking over at an executive who had a stone face through the entire thing. When it was over, he stood up and said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ That was the end of it.” Definitely no parking validation there, either.

And then came the inflection point: a meeting that brought together three talented creatives with fresh points of view that would fuel them to tell stories in clever new ways with a little-known but growing network anxious to build a brand. RCG had landed at FX, with its new president who wanted to shake up television programming and the way TV series were made. And who was the only executive open to the idea of allowing these three green would-be showrunners to learn how to make a TV series on his company’s dime. FX president John Landgraf thought he might have found the show that would allow him to start creating a signature comedy block at his new TV home. And just like Goldilocks, the It’s Always Sunny on TV team thought they might have finally found their just-right.