Roughly five years after several It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes were plucked from streaming platforms for blackface, redface, brownface and other offensive jokes, fans have found a way to watch them anyways — venturing to their public libraries in pursuit of the pulled installments.
“Looking for banned episodes? Head to your local library!” one Redditor captioned a photo of their haul, which consisted of Seasons Eight, Nine and Fourteen, featuring three of the five removed episodes.
Apparently fascinated by the prospects of checking out Always Sunny’s banned instalments, several fans flocked to the comments to express their envy, share links to pirating websites and make a whole lot of jokes.
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“Did the library video clerk guy recommend Lethal Weapon 6?” wrote one commenter, referencing the show’s penultimate Lethal Weapon episode.
“I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how they talked the local library into displaying those seasons,” added another, paraphrasing “The Gang Makes Lethal Weapon 7.”
Always Sunny fans, however, aren’t the only ones standing by the series’ more controversial episodes. Nearly four years after Rob Mac admitted that his “barometer is off for what’s appropriate” in reference to the show’s Lethal Weapon episodes — “We’ve spent 15 years making a show about the worst people on the planet,” he said at a 2021 FX press conference — some of his co-stars have more recently begged to differ.
Ahead of the show’s current 17th season, Glenn Howerton told the New York Times’ style magazine, T, that “a true bigot probably won’t be able to appreciate the humour behind the show.”
Charlie Day has also refused to denounce these episodes, explaining to both Mac and Howerton that if he could, he wouldn’t eradicate a single episode of the series during a stop by Hot Ones Versus back in June.
“That’s impossible. I would delete none of them from existence,” Day said before offering to “take on whatever hot sauce thing I gotta do.”
Of course, he’d say that. It’s not like his illiterate Always Sunny character, Charlie Kelly, has ever even been to a library.