How I Got Through This

‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Got Me Through 2020

The Gang’s chaos agents helped me understand what the hell just happened

Michelle Legro
GEN
Published in
4 min readDec 28, 2020

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Photo illustration; source: FXX /Courtesy: Everett Collection

At the end of every day, I slide three feet from the desk where I sit with my computer, to the couch where I sit with my computer. I’ve made something for dinner — at this point an exercise in calories, and boredom, usually over polenta — when my boyfriend turns to me and asks me the same question. “Time for The Funny?” he says.

It’s been a long day online, my brain has melted into a jiggly-wiggly blob. “One Funny,” I reply. “Maybe two.”

The Funny is 30 minutes of the only thing that has brought unfiltered, screaming, crying laughter into my life over the last eight months: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, all 14 seasons, 154 episodes. By the end of the year I will have watched it all — except for the five episodes that have been removed from Hulu for blackface and other offensive impressions. The past 15 years of the show’s run have been a journey, to say the least.

A low-budget, shaky-camera show that premiered in 2005 and was never supposed to make it past season one, It’s Always Sunny is a half-hour sitcom that has outlasted the age of half-hour sitcoms. It was just renewed for four more…

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Michelle Legro
GEN
Writer for

Deputy Editor, GEN. Previously an editor for Topic, Longreads, The New Republic, and Lapham’s Quarterly. gen.medium.com