A Deleted It's Always Sunny Scene Gave Rob Thomas' Cameo A Much, Much Darker Ending
One thing to know about "Always Sunny" is that it isn't afraid to go dark. From Charlie getting molested to Dennis being a possible serial killer, this is a show filled to the brim with material that would be horrifying if delivered in a slightly different tone. Such was the case in the season 4 episode "Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life," the one where Dennis ends up in a terrifying rehab center. There he's harassed by two patients, comedian Sinbad and musician Rob Thomas. Sinbad is a terrifying force of nature, and Thomas is his loyal, quiet sidekick. The episode ends with the reveal that this was all in Dennis's head, or was it? It's sort of ambiguous.
In the original version of the episode, Sinbad and Rob Thomas got a lot more screen time, with brutal results for Thomas. As Charlie Day explained on The Always Sunny Podcast:
"There was a beat where Rob Thomas breaks Glenn out of the psychiatric ward and he says, 'Look, you gotta get outta here, Sinbad's crazy,' you know? And then he thanks Rob Thomas and he climbs out the window or something like that. And then Rob Thomas, like, pulls a gun and we pan off of Rob Thomas to the picture of Sinbad and then blood splatters across Sinbad's face."
Even with the camera panning away, it's an insanely graphic image. Of course, it's not all that bad for the imaginary Thomas — he technically gets to redeem himself, saving Dennis's life and heroically standing up to the diabolical Sinbad in the process — but it's still perhaps a little too dark to just toss into a sitcom. But the real reason it was cut had nothing to do with tone; it was an issue of time.
A Frankenstein episode
Charlie Day referred to it as a "Frankenstein episode," due to how "we had to pull out so much of this episode to get it to the run time. And we pulled out just enough that it made sense." Potential misreadings of "Frankenstein" aside, it's easy to see what Day's talking about: the episode is as funny as any season 4 outing, but it speeds through a lot of material in a really short period of time. Day compared it to the two-parter "Mac and Charlie Die," which also started as an episode that veered way too far past a standard 22-minute runtime. "Nowadays there's more wiggle room in television," Day explained, "but back then ... You pretty much have to hit this time window, because we have all these ads that are paying for the eyeballs."
He and Glenn Howerton confirmed that they'd tried to turn "Dennis: An Erotic Memoir" into a two-parter as well, but FX gave them a hard no. "They never wanted two-parters," Howerton said. "You know, they always wanted the show to play like you could watch any episode at any time and it wasn't tied to anything else."
The result was that while "Mac and Charlie Die" was expanded to fit an hour time slot, this episode was squeezed down into just thirty minutes. It led to a somewhat rushed, feverish episode, one that probably could've excelled in the modern streaming era where episodes often get to be as long as they want. On the bright side, at least the subsequent edits spared the life of imaginary Rob Thomas. He may have died a horrible death, but only in the DVDs. As far as regular viewers are concerned, Thomas lived to sing another day.