The It's Always Sunny Gang Plagiarized Themselves To Create The Waitress Character
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is a somewhat unique comedy series in that the central cast and creative team have known one another for years, working together long before FX picked up their homemade pilot and they had a cable TV show together. That means that some of their inside jokes and gags go back decades, and in at least one instance, they ended up plagiarizing themselves by reusing a gag from one of their homemade shorts to create a major character for "Always Sunny." Then again, maybe plagiarism is too strong a word, considering the fact that the short wasn't really shown to the masses prior to "Sunny" blowing up and it's a very basic character premise, but they definitely still copied themselves.
On an episode of "The Always Sunny Podcast" aptly titled "The Waitress," actor Mary Elizabeth Ellis joined the regular "Sunny" podcast crew of Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, and Megan Ganz to discuss everything about her character, and it turns out that she has some rather interesting origins.
A waitress playing a waitress
Prior to filming what would become the "Always Sunny" pilot, the gang filmed a mockumentary about, according to Howerton, "a grown-up Haley Joel Osment living with grown-up Frankie Muniz." The general idea was that the two of them were broke and trying to get back into acting, and Howerton played their acting teacher. Ellis played a waitress at the Olive Garden in Burbank who was having a "backdoor relationship" with Osment, but that was probably because she was actually a waitress at an Olive Garden in real life at the time. Ganz teased the guys about constantly making the women in their creations waitresses, but Day and McElhenney had pretty good explanations as to why. Day explained that at that stage in their lives, they didn't know very many women who weren't waitresses, and McElhenney pointed out that they were pretty much all waiters and waitresses at that point anyway. Starving actors do often wait tables to survive, so that makes a lot of sense.
That means that Ellis went from being an Olive Garden waitress to playing an Olive Garden waitress to playing a coffee shop waitress whose name is never revealed. Poor Ellis will never escape being a waitress, it seems, even if her days of waiting tables are long behind her.
Re-using the Haley Joel Osment joke, too
Perhaps in homage to the original mockumentary, Haley Joel Osment did star in a promo for season 8 of "It's Always Sunny." In the promo, the regular cast pretended like they had quit and were replaced by different entertainers, including Osment as Mac and Xzibit as Dee. Osment has had a pretty great run on television, especially in comedies, so there's always a chance he could end up returning to the series and actually appear in an episode. Maybe he and Charlie (Day) can go hunting for ghouls together, since Osment saw dead people when he played a child medium in "The Sixth Sense." That would be a fun way of recycling the idea and bring it all together, and heck, maybe they can all go out to eat at Olive Garden and see the Waitress at her new job.
"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" continues to be one of the funniest shows on TV, with 16 incredible seasons under their belt. Some ideas had to be recycled at some point, and if it's just Ellis playing a waitress, then this fan is totally okay with it.