It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Shot A Month's Worth Of Stunts In Less Than 48 Hours
Everyone loves a good bottle episode, which is when the characters of a TV show spend the entire episode (or almost the entire episode) in one setting. The practical point of this is to save money, and perhaps used that saved money to help make another episode that's expected to be way more expensive. But what about when a show seems to be doing a bottle episode, only to throw the premise upside down and give us something that looks even more expensive than a typical episode? Such was the case with "The Gang Saves the Day," the season 9 episode of "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" that technically takes place entirely in a convenience store. The gang finds themselves witnessing a burglary, and they spend the entire story trying to figure out how to handle this.
From the first scene, you'd think it'd be easy to imagine how this will all play out. The gang will get involved in the burglary, maybe commit some crimes themselves, and escape the convenience store to live another day in filth and squalor. Instead, "Always Sunny" gives us something far more ambitious and far more expensive: Although the gang technically never leaves the store, we're still treated to multiple fantasy sequences that take us back out into the rest of the world, including one fantasy sequence that's told entirely in animation.
Even more notable is that half the characters get a cool fight sequence, the sort of thing that feels like it must've taken weeks to film. This is not a bottle episode, "The Gang Saves the Day" quickly makes clear; this is something far more ridiculous. For Rob McElhenney, whose character Mac fights multiple Yakuza thieves, filming this episode required squeezing a month of training into two days.
Rob McElhenney's main request: 'Just make me look badass'
The show's stunt coordinator, Marc Scizak, explained to The New York Times that, if this were a typical high-budget action movie, Mac's big fight scene "would've taken a month" to prepare for. "[McElhenney] essentially said, 'Just make me look badass,'" Scizak recalled. "It was a very, very large undertaking and I think it turned out really nice."
In a behind-the-scenes video, Scizak also commended McElhenney's ability to rise to the demands of such a tight schedule:
"We put him through 90% of the fight [...] he did an amazing job, he picked it up ridiculously fast. A lot of these action actors have done it for years, and they're not as good as he is."
The results of the scene are hard to argue with. Although the quick cuts might garner some suspicion from the audience of a big blockbuster movie, by TV standards it was pretty unambiguously cool. "For a TV show, it is an epic fight," Scizak agreed. "We went inside the fight for reactions, for punches, for kicks. Normally we would cover the shot just wide, we wouldn't be able to get those inserts. But in this we went full on movie style, doing 90 set-ups a day, just pumping through it." Although poor Mac will never truly get to properly prove his badassery to the gang, at least McElhenney's successfully proven himself to his fellow cast and crew members (not to mention millions of "Always Sunny" viewers).