It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Glenn Howerton plays Dennis Reynolds as one of the stars, creators, producers and writers of the FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Along with Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day, they shot a pilot on  their own, sent it into the network and got picked up for a series.  Starting its third season on September 13 with back-to-back episodes at 10pm, the show's cast also includes Kaitlin Olson and comedy legend Danny DeVito.  It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia centers around four woefully ignorant and politically incorrect people running a bar and dealing with social issues like racism or abortion in a hilariously off-beat manner.

For the third season, the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia MySpace page is offering one of the new episodes from August 16-23 as an early preview for fans eager to see what the gang has in store.  The episode, titled "Mac is a Serial Killer," naturally focuses on the gang's suspicion that there good friend Mac is murdering women, though his real secret is almost as disturbing.

Glenn Howerton spoke to BuddyTV about the new season, working with Danny DeVito, and explaining the totally untrue rumors about an episode titled "Dennis Gets a Puppy."  Below you will find the complete transcript as well as the mp3 audio file of the interview.

This is John from Buddy TV, and we're talking to Glenn Howerton from the FX series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. How you doing, Glenn?

I'm good, I'm good. How are you doing?


I'm doing great. Now you, Rob McElhenney, and Charlie Day created this show together. How did you guys get started working together?

The three of us we knew each other from New York, and we all moved out to L.A. around the same time. We just started shooting little home movies together, 'cause we were bored on our off-time, and we were actors. And so we just had a lot of time, we were sitting around waiting for material to come by.

We kind of got sick of that, so we decided to just start shooting some home movies, and we did a couple of things together. One of the things that we did was this little thing that we called It's Always Sunny on TV, which is about these actors in L.A. It started off with one of the characters going over to his friend's house to get some sugar for his coffee.

And the one guy telling his friend that he has cancer. Once we just kind of thought was like a funny little one-scene short, and then it kind of snowballed into this television show about these guys running a bar in Philly, somehow. To make a long story short, it's kind of the same characters, except we just stuck them in Philly.


Now in addition to creating it, you guys produce, write and star in it. Are very involved in the whole creative process, how do you balance all of those aspects?

Well, they all go hand-in-hand, really. Honestly, we micromanage every single aspect of the show, just because we're too much of perfectionists. Each one of us is too much of a perfectionist to let it fall into the wrong hands. So it creates a lot more work than responsibility for us.

But it's the only way that we feel like we can get done what we want to get done on the show, so we write a lot of it. We did actually have some writers this year for the third season, 'cause we did 15. But of course, we were there through the whole process, breaking the stories with them. And doing quite honestly most of the rewrites as well.

Or at least a lot of them, and then in terms of producing the show that's the only way you can have the power to sort of make final decisions in the editing process. Which is, the three stages of filmmaking are the writing, shooting, and the editing. Every single stage is equally important to the other, you can't have it if…

The whole thing would not work if the editing wasn't, if the timing, the editing didn't work as well. And the right music wasn't put here, and the right sound effects and transitions, and all that stuff really goes into making a show work. So in terms of keeping the balance, they're all kind of the same thing. In a lot of ways, they're all just the three stages of getting your vision across, getting the show done the way that it should be done.


Now, you guys tackle some very serious political issues very comically. And I'm wondering, have you ever tossed out an idea or made a suggestion that the other guys or that the network said, “That's too far.” Or, “We can't do this.” Or is anything fair game?

No, you know what? Everything is fair game. But there have been plenty of times we talked about things in a room, when we're breaking stories, that we don't feel is… Our rule is simply this: if it's funny, if it makes you laugh, it works. If it doesn't make you laugh, then it doesn't work.

I think the things that don't make us laugh are the things that are unnecessarily cruel or hateful, and that's sort of the barometer by which we gauge everything. We feel like if we're specifically, as the writers and creators of the show, making fun of or humiliating or being cruel towards any person, or race, creed, religion, or anything like that.

We don't do it because we don't think it's funny. Now, it's one thing for a character to be ignorant. I think a lot of times, a lot of the comedy this show comes out, a certain character's ignorant. Ignorance as to how he's coming across, or an ignorance as to the type of things that come out of his mouth, that's what's funny.

Because that's where a lot of unnecessary racism, things like that come from. They just come from ignorance, and it's an easy way to put a common twist on it. And a lot of times it just comes out of ignorance. But I think the thing that we do, it's a hard thing. You can touch on a really hot issue, and depending on the way you treat it, how you treat it, one person could make it funny.

But coming out of somebody else's mouth, it just sounds offensive, and it's not funny. It's a hard thing to, there's no rule, it's just either it is funny or it isn't. We just sort of try and gauge it on our own opinion, it's a tough thing to explain.


Now starting today, August 16, and for the rest of this week. You've actually put one of the season three episodes, Mac as a serial killer, on the show's official MySpace page. What was the, where did the decision come from to leak, or to promote an entire episode before it's even been aired?

That was actually the network's suggestion, the network's sort of like, idea. It's just another way of getting the word out there, I mean, so much of promoting anything these days is getting things out virally. And the best way to do that is obviously on the Internet, since kind of the only way to do it.

So we thought it might be a good idea to do what people do with something like this, and who knows? We'll see if people actually get to see it. It's a very funny episode, I think it's a great episode. But yeah, it came from the network, that was their idea.


Well I agree, it's a very funny episode. I actually just watched it this morning, a fantastic episode. And I noticed again, as with a lot of these episodes, the whole gang always seems to be ragging on Kaitlin Olson's character, Sweet Dee. Just making fun of how she's not an attractive woman, and making her dress up like, you made her dress up like a psycho clown in this episode. How do you guys get along with her, and is that part of like the fun, of just constantly putting down the one girl on the team?

Yeah it, you know, it's a… (laughter) She's great about that. I mean, that's just something that we had a lot of it. Kind of, I feel like a twist on things, that I've never really quite seen before in such a kind of misogynistic way. You know, to have characters that are meant to be friends with each other, that are friends with each other.

They're best friends with each other, and every single person is so mean to everybody else, and more than willing to stab their best friend in the back at any given moment, in order to achieve their own personal selfish goal. And one of those things that just sort of comes hand-in-hand with that very naturally, is a group of really stupid misogynistic guys constantly making fun of one girl character.

It's that sort of group mentality, that mob mentality. She sticks out in the sense that she's the only girl amongst four guys, and so she ends up getting the brunt of it.



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