A hallmark of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s later seasons has been their commitment to the meta and recurring jokes. Standout episodes, like “The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award” from season nine, showcased their ability to digest our world into their warped landscape and come to the conclusion that, at least in this reality, the Gang is deserving of tangible awards. But for all the rewards to long-term viewers that the show’s content provides, they’ve begun season eleven with an interesting artistic premise: What if the episodes were entirely copy-pasted from previously used material?
This Oulipian approach recalls Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in both that the episode is essentially a new arrangement of plots with an established understanding to them and that, unlike season eight’s “The Gang Recycles Their Trash”, there’s a subtlety to the tricks going on here. This allows for the commitment to acting within a self-contained universe to not become overbearing. For example, when Frank (Danny DeVito) calls Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Dee (Kaitlin Olson) in the throes of yet another crack binge, the ringtone selected is Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend”, a quieter reference to “Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare” than the recurrence of their attempts to get said welfare. It helps in adding new details to the well-established profiles of the main characters, too; the reveal of Dennis wanting to become a veterinarian just so he could collect the animal skins is wholly unsurprising yet jarring in his manic response to Dee’s accusation.
The relapsing (both literally and figuratively) of the Gang into their basest of habits is all thanks to the titular plot device: Frank falling out the window in the show’s cold open. After waking up from the fall, he believes it to be 2006, the year in which Danny DeVito joined the show’s cast, and the four remaining members of the Gang conspire to use his concussed state to redo their chances at stealing his considerable wealth. As the saying goes, though, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and in this case, cat food-fueled debauchery is the sweetest nectar Frank, incapacitated or otherwise, could know.
His belief that it’s 2006 leads to some hilarious recurring jokes of their own, most notably Charlie’s (Charlie Day) insistence that the window was a time portal sending Frank back in time, giving no credibility to the obvious answer of Frank’s actions coming from head trauma (remember, Charlie’s a pretend lawyer, not a doctor). Of the five major characters, Mac (Rob McElhenney) plays the most reasonable, and therefore least visible, person during the episode. While screening for new roommates for Charlie, he expresses disbelief that anybody would willingly eat cat food, and Charlie’s subconscious desire to pull Frank into his life was met with Mac’s reminder of the lucrative plan put in place.
While “Frank Falls Out the Window” very well could have ended like last week’s “Chardee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo”, as a convoluted plot by Frank to somehow teach his younger counterparts a lesson (not unlike another hyper-referential show’s patriarch; i.e., Arrested Development) or prove a point, it’s nice to see the episode’s catalyst, the beloved rum ham, be the vehicle by which Frank awakes from his decade-long blind spot. In a pre-season 11 interview, Charlie Day confessed that actual rum ham is nowhere as delectable as the characters make it seem, which leaves fans wondering what Frank snacked on to bookend the episode. With the understanding that awards are going to be extraordinarily hard to come by, season 11 looks like the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia crew doubling down on pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a “new” episode of television without caring about attracting new fans in the process. For the uninitiated, a Netflix run of all prior seasons would be advised: the Gang’s back, but that doesn’t mean their present can’t be entirely composed of the past.