“Attention Everyone! Gather Around!” The Gang is back, and more depraved than ever before.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia has always been a bold show, the series premiere made fun of racism and homophobia all at once, but as each season has passed we’ve seen the characters fall further and further away from acceptable human standards and into the most extremely dysfunctional group on TV. No two characters exemplify this fall better than Frank and Cricket, and both were in excellent form in Pop–Pop: The Final Solution.
We’ve seen Frank go from successful businessman, to sharing a pull-out couch with another man, to using his toe-knife for apple peeling. Tonight he hits a new low, as we find Frank keeping his father-in-law alive with hopes of obtaining some secret Nazi treasure. However, Frank’s version of keeping Pop-Pop alive involves filling the room with months worth of soup and shaving the man’s feet from some kind of disgusting growth (presumably with his same toe-knife.)
Cricket’s transformation has been even more dramatic. He began a priest and turned into a street rat/crack addict, before hitting the all-time low we find him in tonight. He’s working in an animal shelter, looking grubbier than ever, cleaning up the explosive diarrhea of a Mastiff. Somehow Cricket always falls into the path of the Gang, whether it’s forging stools or, as in tonight’s episode, carrying off Charlie’s painting of a German Shepherd.
Part of Sunny‘s strength is in the quality of its non-core characters. Think about how great the McPoyles are, or Artemis, despite how infrequently they show up. The fact Cricket is absent from most episodes, but is still one of the most notable characters on the show, speaks volumes to the performance that David Hornsby gives, but also to how well the comedy is spread throughout the show. Another rarely used, but extremely funny characters is the Lawyer
The Lawyer is always a great addition to an episode. Whether he’s going tit for tat with Charlie on bird law or he’s busy stealing the Gang’s patents, he’s one of the few characters who vocalizes all the negative things everyone else feels about the Gang. He absolutely dreads seeing these people, yet consistently has to come in contact with them, which is a mixture that leads to pure hilarity. Although the passing of Pop-Pop will lead to him having no legal obligation to the Gang, I’m confident that we’ll see a lot more of the Lawyer.
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