It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia S8 E3 - The Maureen Ponderosa Wedding Massacre (Uncut Reaction)

I love this episode, and I’m excited to see your reaction to it! That said, now that I see you’ve skipped 8x2 I’m afraid I have to join the chorus of individuals who have previously expressed their disappointment for your decision not to watch the so-called “banned” episodes of the show, although I’m sorry that not everyone has expressed their disappointment very politely in the past. I do just want to give another perspective though, in the hopes you might reconsider down the road. Sorry for writing so much (I really wrote a ton), but I felt like you deserved a thorough take on the subject and it’s a somewhat multifaceted conversation. The bottom line is, you’ve now missed out on three of the best episodes of the show, and I just don’t think there’s actually a very good reason for that. These episodes feature “offensive” content in the sense that they’re episodes where the Gang, oblivious or just not inclined to care about social norms or common decency, engages in outrageous behavior at the expense of others around them. You’ll notice that I’ve just described every single episode of the show since its inception. Bad taste and pushing the limits is hardly unique to only a handful of episodes of Always Sunny, and the satirical nature of the way it’s portrayed is essentially the purpose of the show. If you hadn’t been comfortable with that, you wouldn’t have made it eight seasons into said show. I also want to underscore that these banned episodes were never really “banned” in the first place, not in the conventional sense: they weren’t episodes that the network wouldn’t air, they weren’t episodes the creators/authors of the show decided not to release or to retroactively retract. They were removed because a corporation decided to draw an arbitrary line and censor a group of creators. In 2020, when the problems of racial injustice in America were (rightfully) on everyone’s mind and tensions were high, the owners of several streaming services decided to engage in a sort of performative censorship and remove “offensive” episodes of their television shows, in order to appear as though they were making any kind of difference. In actuality, we all know that they weren’t doing their best to combat racism or injustice with this behavior, in this country or any other, but only to try and appeal i(n an extremely superficial way) to groups and individuals justifiably calling for the mistreatment of minorities to end; and to be clear, their end goal here was, and always has been, financial stability more than any kind of increased social progress or sensitivity. As far as these episodes themselves, the context was completely ignored, and specific episodes that featured one particular type of racism, visual depictions, were jettisoned carelessly while others with content less obvious but just as objectionable, or even more so, were left untouched. This goes for Always Sunny as well as several other shows, such as NBC’s Community. No attention was paid to the fact that the point of the use of blackface or other racial stereotypes in these episodes was to mock the stupidity of the individuals involved with them, or else to make similar points condemning the racist behavior, and that that is made abundantly clear in the writing and performances. It is very obvious who is in the wrong during these sequences, and it’s insulting to be treated as though we, as an audience, cannot separate depiction of a behavior from an endorsement or approval. I am absolutely in favor of condemning racism, of ending racial injustice, and of all other goals of progress related to these things. But to remove episodes of a comedy television show does not serve to further these goals, and many, many members of the communities which these corporations are pandering to superficially are often more offended by their shallow attempts than they are the episodes themselves. Additionally, I’m very much anti-censorship in art. I don’t think it’s right for a company to edit or remove existing artistic material, previously approved, just as an attempt to protect their bottom line. That goes especially for the realm of comedy. It is important that comedy remain an arena where any topic or issue can be successfully approached and lampooned, if done carefully and cleverly. It should be up to people, exclusively, to decide whether a piece of comedy has crossed a line or failed to toe it properly, not large businesses obsessed with optics. Even recently, Kaitlin Olson specifically has said that she stands completely by the episodes that have been removed, and wishes they were still widely available. I believe it’s somewhat disrespectful to the Sunny crew to skip out on certain episodes against their wishes, and to concede to arbitrary restrictions enforced on them by higher-ups with dubious motivations, instead of watching the show as intended by its creators. If anybody actually read all of that, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. If you disagree, your mind may not be changed but hopefully you can see where all of us who love these episodes which are supposedly “too offensive” are coming from, and why the notion of such a thing when it comes to IASIP seems ludicrous or short-sighted.

Derek Jolstead