Tell Me Lies Season 3 Features An Easter Egg Referencing One Of TV's Best Comedies

Don't start up any toxic or illicit relationships if you haven't seen "Tell Me Lies" season 3, episode 6, "I Don't Cry When I'm Sad Anymore." Spoilers ahead!

In its third season, "Tell Me Lies" — the series spearheaded by showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer and based on Carola Lovering's bestselling novel of the same name — is still home to some of the wildest drama on television. What you might not have noticed, though, is the series' latest episode directly references and obliquely features one of television's best and longest-running comedies ... specifically, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."

Oppenheimer, who's considerably expanded the world of Lovering's novels by giving focus to characters outside of the leads (Grace van Patten's Lucy Albright and Jackson White's Stephen DeMarco, two sickos who spend the entire show tormenting each other in an on-again, off-again relationship), spends quite a bit of time in season 3 focusing on a new romance. Specifically, Lucy's best friend Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Stephen's ex-girlfriend Diana (Alicia Crowder) strike up a secret relationship, despite the fact that Pippa is publicly dating Stephen and Lucy's friend Wrigley (Spencer House).

In one scene in episode 6, "I Don't Cry When I'm Sad Anymore," the two are watching television on one of their laptops and cuddling, and if you listen carefully like I did, you'll immediately clock that they're watching "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." Even more specifically, Diana and Pippa are watching the episode "The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis," which aired in September 2008. Not only is this appropriate for the timeline (just like the show's pitch-perfect needle drops), seeing as this part of "Tell Me Lies" takes place while the characters are attending college in 2009, but it's also the perfect choice for a little TV-related Easter egg.

One of the longest-running live-action comedies in TV history, "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" has been around since 2005 and has been going strong ever since ... and, frankly, the genius of "Tell Me Lies" using "The Gang Solves The Gas Crisis" is that it's one of the show's best episodes. In this season 4 outing, the titular gang — twins Dennis and Dee Reynolds (Glenn Howerton and Kaitlin Olson), their dad Frank (Danny DeVito), and their two hangers-on Ronald "Mac" McDonald (Rob Mac) and Charlie Kelly (Charlie Day) — decide to "solve" the gas crisis that was hitting the United States around this time. How do they plan to do that, exactly? Well, it's yet another hare-brained scheme courtesy of Mac, who suggests that they take out loans from a bank, buy a ton of gasoline, and sell it later on at a massively inflated price. (If you've ever watched "Always Sunny," you had to know they weren't actually trying to "solve" anything.)

While Charlie, Dennis, and Mac try to pull off their gas scheme by going to a gas station and pouring it into barrels (which obviously doesn't work, because they get caught), Dee and Frank start following Dee and Dennis' biological father Bruce Mathis (disgraced actor Stephen Collins) to see how he's spending money that once belonged to Dennis and Dee's mother. The entire episode is, frankly, depraved, but that's what "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" is: a show about despicable cretins who come up with cockamamie ideas and make fools of themselves. In that way, it's the perfect show to feature on "Tell Me Lies," and not just because it's accurate to the time period.

Okay, hear me out: "Tell Me Lies" and "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" are two sides of the same coin. Part of the conceit of "Always Sunny" is that its characters feel like they're trapped in an endless loop, which actually allows for some pretty ingenious storytelling. (In the show's 11th season, the gang appears to die on a cruise ship only to return, as if nothing happened, in season 12.) However, it also means that its characters never grow, change, or evolve. This shouldn't work, but it does. Instead of feeling stagnant, "Always Sunny" can put the gang into truly absurd situations without forcing the audience to be concerned about their well-being; instead, we can just laugh at them without worrying.

In "Tell Me Lies," the characters want to evolve, but throughout the third season, they just don't ... aside from Pippa and Diana, who leave unfulfilling relationships behind to pursue one with each other. Lucy returns to Stephen time and time again and is horrible to other people in the process, and it would be downright polite to call Stephen an absolute sociopath; and those are just two of the show's characters. Part of the fun of "Tell Me Lies" is that these individuals also feel trapped in a loop, whether we're in the 2009 timeline or the 2015 timeline where they all gather for a wedding. In that way, "Tell Me Lies" using a clip from "Always Sunny" is absolutely perfect ... because both shows focus on a bunch of miscreants who constantly self-destruct.

"Tell Me Lies" debuts new episodes on Tuesdays on Hulu, and you can also watch "Always Sunny" on the streamer.