Glenn Howerton Might Be Done With Always Sunny?! Say It Ain't So, Dennis!
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I have to start off with a question I’m pretty sure I know the answer to, but just in case: Are you leaving the show?
So… it’s a little complicated. I may seem a little bit evasive here, and I don’t mean to. It’s not entirely certain whether I am or am not. I might be. I might be, but I might not be. That really is the truth. Just to be clear, to dispel any potential weirdness, it has nothing to do with my relationship to anyone on the show or Rob or Charlie or anyone like that. It’s partially a creative and personal decision. We may be taking an extended hiatus between season 12 and season 13. So I’m certainly staying open to the possibility of doing more, but there is a possibility that I will not.
(An hour or so after we finished speaking, clarity appeared in the form of reports in the Hollywood trade press that Howerton has signed to do an NBC comedy pilot with Patton Oswalt. These things are usually verboten to discuss before they become official, and as the Variety report suggests, this would be a slightly different situation than Kaitlin Olson pulling double duty with Sunny and The Mick, since FX and Fox are corporate siblings (and thus more amenable to share their stars than NBC would be if it had Howerton on a series regular contract), and since Howerton is a writer and executive producer on Sunny, while Olson just acts. So it sounds like his availability for future seasons will depend on whether the NBC pilot goes to series, and/or whether Sunny season 13 is delayed long enough to create a hole in Howerton’s schedule that lets him do both.)
I’ve been processing this information since this morning and I’m gonna be honest with you all, it’s not good. It’s very not good.
It’s a sobering moment because for the last thirteen years I’ve just assumed that Always Sunny would never end and never change. I’ve observed “the gang” as something of a family that wasn’t in search of stardom and was quite content being cult heroes and doing thirteen episodes of whatever the fuck they want every year. They’ve just always had that “more in it for the fun than the fortune” vibe to them.
But alas, human nature exists and they long for bigger and better things. Sweet Dee is the star of her own (excellent!) show on Fox, The Mick, Charlie is sharing the silver screen with Ice Cube, and now it looks like Dennis if off to make a name for himself on NBC. I haven’t been this distraught since NSYNC broke up.
That’s not to say the show is over, it seems like they’ll continue, albeit with something of a hiatus before next season, but the writing is on the wall and I have a really hard time seeing it as the same show without Dennis. The Sunny team isn’t really built on the back of one member, but they all play outrageously important roles, so you could argue that the whole team is built on the back of every member. To me, every character is a load-bearing wall and without them the entire structure can crumble. The importance of every individual relationship in The Gang is the bedrock of the show and if you pull from the bottom, it could all very well fall.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope Glenn and the rest of the crew find a way to make it all work, but reading that statement and subsequent release about the sow with Patton Oswalt makes it seem like the time has come to say goodbye to Dennis Reynolds. It’s heartbreaking. He was towards the bottom of my Sunny Power Rankings in the early seasons, but as the years have gone on and the sociopathy has increased, he’s become one of my favorites. His rants and psychotic tendencies have become a highlight of the show, culminating in the excellent “Making Dennis Reynolds A Murderer” episode that aired this season.
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As they say, it’s better to burnout than fade away, and if Dennis really is leaving then that’s exactly what Sunny did. This season was one of my favorites yet, which is remarkable in a twelfth year, and I will miss Dennis so dearly. Godspeed, Golden God.