Dee Reynolds (Kaitlin Olson) spends the last episode of Season 18 temporarily blind after LASIK surgery, rattled by the break-ins in her neighborhood. She is asking for the one thing nobody on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” has ever reliably given anyone, which is a little help. All she wants is for the guys to spend the night at her place so she does not have to sit there alone in the dark. It is the most reasonable request anyone has made on this show in years. FX’s own description of the episode says the guys “listen to the wolves inside themselves,” which is about as tidy a summary of the series as anyone has written. What the wolves want is a sleepover of their own, with Dee left off the list. For most of the half hour that is exactly the episode you would expect, cruel and gross and very funny. Then, late in the night and somewhere above a dumpster, the finale turns into something the show almost never lets itself be.
“The Guys Have a Sleepover” aired Monday, October 12th on FX and FXX, closing a ten-episode season that premiered with two episodes on August 17th and ran longer than the eight-episode seasons before it. Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton wrote it and Todd Biermann directed it. That matters more than usual here, because the scene the whole episode leans on belongs to the two characters its writers play. It also arrives without a safety net. The multi-season order FX placed in December 2020 ran through this season, and no Season 19 had been announced by the time the finale aired. That leaves a slightly sentimental half hour about grown men at a slumber party carrying more weight than a sleepover gag was ever built to hold. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” Season 18 finale, “The Guys Have a Sleepover.”
Then, late in the night and somewhere above a dumpster, the finale turns into something the show almost never lets itself be.”
The episode opens with Dee telling the Gang about the break-ins near her apartment, and the guys respond the way they always respond to Dee, by mocking her for being obsessed with true crime. She insists she only wants to know enough to stay safe. When she asks them to sleep over at her place until her eyes recover, they laugh that off too, because they are not kids. Then, naturally, Mac (Rob Mac), Charlie (Charlie Day) and Frank (Danny DeVito) turn around and hold a guys-only sleepover at the apartment Mac shares with Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who objects to the whole idea from the start. It is a familiar shape for a Sunny episode, the Gang refusing a decent request and then doing the selfish version of the same thing, and for a while it plays like nothing more than that.
Nobody at the sleepover can agree on what a sleepover is actually for, and they argue over what to do and what to watch. The first thing that counts as fun, inevitably, is prank-calling Dee. Charlie, not to be outdone, then sends a stack of pizzas to her door as a prank, a plan that falls apart once it turns out he has paid for them himself. Frank has his own project, a batch of cookies he doctors with his own bodily fluids in the hope that Dee will eat one. It is exactly as revolting as it sounds, although the show does at least make sure he ends up face first in one of them. Frank also creeps into Dee’s apartment during the night, which the episode plays for laughs and which lands, it is fair to say, a good deal more uneasily than the show seems to intend.
Dee, meanwhile, works out that the guys are holding a sleepover without her and calls Artemis (Artemis Pebdani), who arrives with a Ouija board. The two of them try to raise a spirit, and when a knock comes at the door, Artemis talks Dee into answering it to greet whatever they have summoned. It is the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), delivering Charlie’s pizzas, and once she sees the board she decides to stay. TV Fanatic’s review adds that Artemis then drugs the Waitress’ drink, which would be in character for all three of them. Sam Huang, who wrote that review, said it was impossible to keep a straight face watching Dee “fumble around her apartment.” The physical comedy of Olson feeling her way through her own home is the strongest thing on the women’s side of the story, a week after Dee’s throwing arm was the weapon in the Gang’s Little League scheme in “Frank’s Team: A Dark Day for Baseball.”
Eventually, the guys’ night spills outside. By Soap Central’s account, it starts with egging strangers and ends with a driver crashing and coming after them. However it begins, it ends with Mac caught and beaten bloody while Dennis and Charlie get away. The two of them land on a rooftop, still buzzing, and after a passing “Hope Mac’s all right,” Charlie pitches one game of truth or dare and a howl at the moon to finish the night. The dare, Charlie decides, is to jump off the roof into the dumpster below. Dennis refuses, so it has to be truth, and Charlie asks him flat out whether he is scared of sleepovers. Dennis says no twice before admitting that he is. The reason he gives might be the most honest thing the character has said in years: he hates doing dumb things like wrestling grown men in their underwear and jumping off buildings into dumpsters, but he is afraid that if he skips them, people will make fun of him.
Charlie, for once, does not laugh at him. He tells Dennis that everybody is scared of sleepovers, and that they are about facing your fears with your buddies instead of alone. Then he lands the line the episode was written to reach: “Sleepovers are where you learn that when you have friends, the world’s a lot less scary place.” Dennis takes a moment before answering with the line that sticks, saying that “when you’re a kid, dares are the scariest thing. But when you’re an adult, the truth is so much scarier.” The city lights stay blurred behind him through most of his close-ups, and for a minute or so this is just two men who admit on that roof that they are “like, 50,” saying something true. They hug it out, and Charlie apologizes for how stressed Dennis has been all night. Then, with a yell of “Charlie Spaghetti,” he takes both of them off the roof and into the dumpster anyway.
It is the oldest trick this show has, and it still works, because the scene gives the sincerity room before the punchline arrives and Day and Howerton play the sincere part almost straight. Back at Dee’s, she and Artemis have moved on to summoning Bloody Mary when somebody starts pounding on the door. It is Mac, covered in blood after his beating, and Dee, who still cannot see, fails to recognize him and beats him all over again. The episode ends with the whole Gang in sleeping bags at the guys’ sleepover. Everyone is asleep except Dennis and Charlie, who stay up until morning to win the sleepover and draw penises on everyone else’s faces while they sleep. The sweetness lasts about as long as it ever does on this show, which is to say not long, but it is still there when the sun comes up.
TV Fanatic and Vulture, reviewing it the night it aired and the morning after, both came back to that rooftop. Huang called the emotional climax “surprisingly poignant,” though the true-crime thread that opens the episode “never really pays off” for him, and he felt indifferent about Frank’s cookie storyline. Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi went further, calling Howerton the “cast MVP” and arguing that the season makes the case the show “could continue on indefinitely.” She also pointed to Dennis telling Charlie the morning after, “I had a blast. I really did.” She noted that the line can be read as Dennis admitting the Gang has reached the end of the road, and she hoped it was not.
The finale, to be clear, is not perfect. The true-crime setup fizzles, Mac spends most of his night getting beaten up, and Frank’s storyline will test anyone without a strong stomach. But the rooftop scene is the rare moment a show can only earn after twenty years of refusing to let its characters grow. It might be the most affecting couple of minutes this season produced. Whether this was a season finale or something bigger, the call now belongs to FX. If this does turn out to be the Gang’s last night on screen, a blind Dee, a bloodied Mac and two grown men who stayed up until dawn to win a sleepover would be a fitting, ugly and oddly sweet place to leave them.
What Do You Think? Was the rooftop talk between Dennis and Charlie the best scene of Season 18, or did the dumpster undo it? Did Frank’s night at Dee’s apartment go too far even for this show? If FX does not order a Season 19, is a sleepover the right way for the Gang to go out?
See you on the next binge!
