Season 17 of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ended on two things happening inside the same minute. Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) chased Sam (Carol Kane) to a bus station in the rain and picked her, closing out the Golden Bachelor arc the Gang had spent three episodes building. Then Willie Nelson came up on the soundtrack, a title card read “For our sweet Lynne,” and the show said goodbye to Lynne Marie Stewart, who had played Charlie’s mother Bonnie Kelly since the first season and died in February 2025 at 78. Here is the detail that makes the new season land the way it does: Bonnie was one of the three women competing for Frank in that finale, and he passed on her to take Sam.
A year on, season 18 opened Monday by clearing both of those women off the board inside two episodes, and it played every second of it for laughs. The premiere landed August 17 on FXX and FX as a back-to-back double, streaming the same night, and it starts a ten-episode run going weekly through October 12. That episode order deserves a beat of its own. The last three seasons ran eight apiece, so FXX has handed a 21-year-old comedy two extra half hours at a moment when almost nothing on television is getting longer, and this is already the longest-running live-action sitcom in American history, a record it took in December 2021 when season 15 passed “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”
What the show does with that first hour is stage a wedding and a funeral in the same building and refuse to let anybody in either room behave like a person. “Frank Marries a Corpse” and “Dennis and Dee Don’t Get Rich” are one continuous story broken across two credit sequences, with Charlie Day writing the premiere, and between them they dispose of a body, an urn, a fortune and a human thumb. It is the grimmest opening the series has attempted, and the two halves are wired into each other so tightly that watching only the first would leave you holding a corpse with no punchline. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia season 18, the fate of Carol Kane’s character and how the show handles Bonnie Kelly’s death.
Season 18 opened Monday by clearing both of those women off the board inside two episodes, and it played every second of it for laughs.”
Frank’s cold feet open the premiere, and they are the only conventional beat in it. Dee Reynolds (Kaitlin Olson) has decided Sam is a gold digger, which is a spectacular piece of reading on a woman whose family sits on billions made in rubber chickens, and she puts together a wrecking crew out of Frank’s romantic history: Artemis (Artemis Pebdani), the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and Gail the Snail (Mary Lynn Rajskub). The plan is that their testimony scares Sam off the wedding. It does the opposite, the way every plan hatched in that bar does the opposite, and the objection curdles into urgency the moment Dennis Reynolds (Glenn Howerton) works out the actual arithmetic.
The arithmetic is that Sam’s money moves if the marriage happens. One fact converts Dee from saboteur to wedding planner inside a single scene, and Dennis never needed converting at all. Meanwhile the reason Frank has cold feet turns out to be medical rather than emotional. He and Sam consummated things early, outdoors, in standing water, and both of them walked away carrying a flesh-eating infection. By the morning of the ceremony Frank can barely hold himself upright and Sam is visibly failing, and the episode lets that sit for an uncomfortable stretch before doing the thing you can already feel coming.
Sam dies before the vows. Standing over a woman who has been dead for minutes, Dennis and Dee decide the wedding is still on, and what follows is the most committed physical set piece the series has built in years. Frank is barely conscious and has to be moved into position. Sam’s body is propped and worked from behind so that it appears to be participating in its own marriage. It holds together long enough to get through the ceremony, and then Frank leans in for the kiss and his bride’s head comes off her shoulders in front of the entire wedding party.
Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) spends the whole hour at a completely different funeral. He brings his mother’s urn to Frank’s wedding and treats the reception as a booking, working an off-key keyboard through a set of original songs about Bonnie that nobody requested and nobody stops. He is the only person in the building grieving anyone, and he is doing it loudly, badly, and at somebody else’s event. That is the joke, and it is also the closest thing the premiere has to a thesis, delivered by the character least equipped to know he is delivering it.
Mac (Rob McElhenney) gets the strangest thread of the two episodes and the one that lands hardest. His mother (Sandy Martin) turns up, and while going through her cigarettes he finds a ventriloquist dummy called Sherman that used to belong to an uncle. Mac decides, on no evidence whatsoever and with total conviction, that Sherman is sentient, and McElhenney plays the escalation dead straight rather than winking at it. Sherman eventually pushes him into coming out to his mother at the wedding, a thing Mac has already done publicly since “Hero or Hate Crime?” back in 2017, and her entire response is two words: “No shit.” Nine years and six seasons of buildup, answered like she is being told the sky is up there.
Episode two picks up in the morgue, with Sam’s body and Sam’s head in different places, and turns the wreckage into a heist. Dennis and Dee need a thumbprint to prove the marriage was legally binding before any money moves, so the plan they land on is stealing their dead stepmother’s thumb. Watching the Reynolds twins negotiate over a corpse’s hand in a room neither of them has any business being in is the purest distillation of these two characters the show has managed in a while, because at no point does either of them pause to consider that they are doing something unusual. What sinks the scheme is not the plan itself.
What sinks it is Frank, who fires Sam’s body out of a cannon. The corpse goes into a river, the thumb goes with it, and the fortune the twins spent two episodes stepping over a dead woman to reach is gone inside a shot lasting about a second. It happens during the Mummers Parade, the annual Philadelphia institution Charlie and Frank have commandeered to give Bonnie the send-off she never got, clowns included. The collision of those two plots is the best structural joke in the premiere: one half of the Gang is holding a sincere memorial for a woman they loved, the other half is trying to rob a body for its thumb, and both halves are in the same parade.
That is the shape of season 18 out of the gate, and it says something about what this show has quietly turned into. For most of its run the engine was that the Gang were monstrous about sex, money, politics and each other. The engine now is that they are monstrous about death specifically, and death keeps showing up because the cast has been working together for 21 years and the real world has started taking people out of the room. Bonnie’s memorial is not a gag the writers reached for. Stewart died in February 2025, months after she finished shooting, and the series has now spent a season finale and a season premiere working out what to do about it. Critics coming off the same screeners split on whether that is enough: Collider’s Meredith Loftus called the season “a step back” from 17 and said its plots were “treading familiar water that only serves as a reminder of great episodes,” while others called the opening vintage Sunny. Both readings survive the first hour, because the corpse wedding is genuinely inspired, the Sherman thread is McElhenney doing his most committed work in seasons, and the Dee-recruits-the-exes structure underneath all of it is a move this show has run before.
What Do You Think? Was killing Carol Kane’s Sam off in the premiere the right call, or should the show have kept her around long enough to actually break Frank? Is Sherman a one-episode bit, or is Mac about to spend a full season taking orders from a piece of wood? And after two goodbyes in two episodes, does ‘Always Sunny’ have anything left to say about death, or has it now said all of it?
See you on the next binge!
