The Single Worst Thing The It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Gang Has Ever Done

The five main characters on "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," known as "the gang," are easily among the most monstrous people in sitcom history, which makes it incredibly difficult to narrow down the single worst thing they've ever done. All the way back in the very first season, Charlie (Charlie Day) pretended to have cancer, the guys made a fake jihad video, and Mac (Rob McElhenney) claimed to have killed an abortion clinic doctor in order to have sex with a pro-life protester, and things have only escalated from there. 

The show is now going into its 17th season, having been on the air for 20 years, and in all of that time the gang have done enough terrible things to put the combined casts of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" to shame. If we're putting it purely in legal terms, there's arson, imitation of a police officer, cocaine distribution, numerous instances of assault, statutory rape, and murder, and that's not even counting the time they locked all of their enemies in their burning apartment. 

There's one scene in "It's Always Sunny" season 13 that took the gang's truly unhinged behavior to new heights (or lows, depending on how you look at it), and we get to see it all depicted on screen in bloody, brutal fashion. While Frank (Danny DeVito) putting dead bodies in soup is pretty horrific and it's uncomfortable to even get into the logistics behind Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and "the implication," watching Mac and Charlie violently beat multiple children, possibly to death, has to be the worst thing the gang has ever done.

In "The Gang Gets New Wheels," Mac and Charlie decide to get themselves some bicycles to make up for the fact that their childhood bikes were stolen by neighborhood bully Shawn Dumont (Tyler Labine). Unfortunately, just as they're starting to enjoy their new wheels, Dumont's son and several of his friends steal the bikes, repeating what happened some twenty-odd years before. When they try to address it with Shawn, he blows them off, and they're too chicken to try to fight him, so instead they decide to take their rage out on the kids. 

What happens next is some of the gnarliest violence against children since Pennywise ripped off Georgie's arm in "It," as Mac and Charlie pummel the living daylights out of the boys, picking them up and throwing them around like rag dolls and then kicking them when they're down. There's something about it that's really funny, especially if you were bullied as a child, but it's also really horrible. After the two of them bolt and jump into Dennis's new Range Rover after completing their carnage, Charlie screams that he thinks he killed one of the kids and Mac agrees with him, shouting "He did! I saw him! I think the kid's dead!" Sure, Mac and Dee (Kaitlin Olson) pushed a sleeping kid down a waterslide in "The Gang Goes to a Water Park" and he might have drowned, but Charlie and Mac's violent vengeance upon the kids was ultimately way worse because it was so intentional and intense. 

It's kind of funny because while all of the members of the gang are heinous in their own ways, Mac and Charlie are usually a little less evil than Frank, Dennis, and Dee. They've been at the very bottom of the food chain for their whole lives, both in the gang and even before, when they were just best friends from seriously unhealthy homes, and they almost deserve a moment to really let it all out ... even if it shouldn't have been directed at a bunch of children too young to even remember 9/11. While it's way less cathartic than Charlie's big emotional break down at the end of season 15, it's also funnier because of just how hard it goes. Mac beats a kid with a trash can lid and Charlie screams in a kid's face after throwing him against a car several times, for heaven's sake, as if they're some kind of badasses for beating up a bunch of boys.

While Dennis's (alleged) murders of both his ex-wife Maureen "Bastet" Ponderosa (Catherine Reitman) and Dee's date in Ireland are pretty bad, at least they were both adults. Mac and Charlie may be man-children, but those actual children never stood a chance.