Spoilers ahead for the Season 17 premiere of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on FXX, called “The Gang F***s Up Abbott Elementary” and available streaming now with a Hulu subscription.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is officially back on FXX for Season 17, nearly two years after Season 16 ended in late July 2023. Fans did get an early look at the gang in action back in the spring of the 2025 TV schedule with the first half of a crossover with ABC’s Abbott Elementary. Naturally, the Gang’s usual brand of crude humor was toned down on ABC, but they could be back at their worst back on their home network. I knew I could count on the main characters getting as offensive as usual outside of network TV, but I didn’t expect Janine (Quinta Brunson) to start dropping some very non-ABC words out of frustration with Dee (Kaitlin Olson)!
The premise of the Always Sunny half of the crossover was that Ava (Janelle James) discovered some hidden footage of the Gang in the halls of Abbott that didn’t make the cut of the Abbot Elementary half of the crossover. While the documentary format was unusual for the FXX series, the schemes felt perfectly in line with what we’d expect from the characters: Dennis (Glenn Howerton) was on a coffee crusade, Frank (Danny DeVito) wanted to steal the copper pipes from the school’s walls with Mac (Rob Mac, the artist formerly known as Rob McElhenney) along for the ride, Charlie (Charlie Day) wanted to make music, and Dee wanted to be a star… by stealing Gregory (Tyler James Wilson) and starting a fight with Janine.
I spent the early minutes of Dee and Janine’s subplot wondering what High Potential fans possibly tuning in to Always Sunny for the first time thought of Kaitlin Olson as Dee as opposed to the brilliant Morgan, but an interview between Janine, Gregory, and the unseen cameraman shocked me so much that I’m still glad I wasn’t eating or drinking anything at the time. Janine got increasingly angry about all things Dee, to the point that she dropped some language that would never ever aired without some serious bleeping on ABC. She said:
I liked Dee at first, but things got awkward when she tried to steal you… Safe to say I liked her less after that. But it wasn’t until I saw the extra footage that I was able to realize just how much of a… I need to say a bad word. It’s real bad. How much of a total fucking cunt she was!
Tell us how you really feel, Janine! Gregory looked about as shocked as I felt at his girlfriend’s vocabulary, stammering out that he thought Janine was going to call Dee a “bitch,” but Janine doubled down by saying she “didn’t feel that was strong enough” because it can also refer to a “very fine dog [and] that is not what this woman is.”
I had to laugh after my moment of shock at Janine dropping those words that she never could on ABC (and my relief that I didn’t have a drink to spit take), because it was a pretty great gag. She was also not the only one taking advantage of the FXX platform, with Ava in particular having fun with some very non-network TV language.
Jacob (Chris Perfetti) wasn’t swearing up a storm compared to others, but I did get a kick out of the Always Sunny gang being so chaotic that he was the straight man to their shenanigans. And honestly, those teachers don’t even know how great Charlie’s lyrics to his rewrite of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” were, as they never witnessed The Nightman Cometh or any of his other musical endeavors.
All in all, I 100% expected that the Always Sunny half of the crossover with Abbott Elementary would be a lot more unhinged on the Gang’s FXX turf, but it was still hilariously jarring to see how fed up Janine was with Dee without a handy ABC bleep to soften the language.
If you missed the Season 17 premiere of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (or the Abbott Elementary Season 4 episode that kicked off the two-part crossover), you can catch up streaming on Hulu now.
