It’s Always Sunny With Rob McElhenney

LOS ANGELES — The previous yr in California has been the driest in a century. However on a current mid-November afternoon, California was beginning to look quite a bit like … Eire.

A minimum of it was within the edit bay for “It’s At all times Sunny in Philadelphia,” the place visible results artists had been diligently tweaking the colour scheme to higher resemble that of the Emerald Isle. Slowly, the parched cliffs of Bodega Bay started to appear like the grassy Slieve League cliffs. The golden, dusty hills of Sonoma County took on the verdant, rain-soaked hues of County Donegal. A number of episodes of the approaching season are set in Eire, the place they had been additionally imagined to be shot earlier than the pandemic intervened. That meant including a variety of inexperienced and grey in put up.

Clad in a black T-shirt emblazoned with a raised fist in help of the Worldwide Alliance of Theatrical Stage Staff, Rob McElhenney jumped up from the sofa, as if yanked by an invisible string. He poked the display with a decisive finger.

“Can we make the mountain nearer to a darker rock?” He sat down, then jumped up once more. “Can we darken the sky?” Then once more. “Is that sufficient of a pinnacle?”

An enormous sigh. A pause. “I really like this job,” he mentioned.

Offscreen, McElhenney, who created and stars in “Sunny,” is within the midst of his personal transformation, and it’s quite a bit more durable when what you’re poking at is your self. When the present returns to FXX for its fifteenth season on Wednesday, it’s going to formally dethrone “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” because the longest operating live-action comedy collection in American TV historical past, and it has already been renewed via Season 18.

For McElhenney, it’s a milestone. However it’s additionally a midpoint, and a trigger for reflection.

He’s embarking on what he calls “the second half” of his profession. Thanks largely to the longevity of “Sunny,” he’s financially set for all times — he doesn’t actually want to do something extra. And but, up to now two years, he has cocreated and stars within the Apple TV+ comedy “Mythic Quest”; codeveloped and offered a 3rd, to-be-announced scripted present; recorded a “Sunny” recap podcast; and is at the moment filming the docu-series “Welcome to Wrexham,” which is able to chart his journey as the brand new co-owner of a Welsh soccer group.

“I’m solely 44,” he mentioned. “So, am I going to take a seat again and simply wait to die?”

Those that know McElhenney know complacency was by no means an choice. They describe him as “essentially the most pushed man I’ve ever met” (“Sunny” govt producer and star Charlie Day); “the captain that you really want in your ship” (his “Sunny” co-star and spouse of 13 years, Kaitlin Olson); and “the ‘Rocky’ soundtrack in human kind” (Megan Ganz, who created “Mythic Quest” with McElhenney and Day and can also be an govt producer on “Sunny”).

Certainly, the boundaries between work and residential appear blurry. Earlier that morning, McElhenney had ushered me right into a indifferent house workplace behind the home he and Olson share with their two sons in Brentwood. His work area, loosely impressed by a Pennsylvania log cabin, was lately enhanced with a bit of the Paddy’s Pub set — full with stools, flooring and a football-helmet-shaped neon signal — that he paid the “Sunny” artwork division to put in.

A voracious reader — or, extra usually, listener — of memoirs by profitable individuals (current choices embrace one by the Nike co-founder Phil Knight), McElhenney speaks with a measured, tutorial eloquence. He pauses solely to sip water from an outsized Mason jar or are inclined to Moose, his and Olson’s rescue cat, who has a penchant for breaking the “no counter tops” rule.

He’s not really humorous. Or so he repeatedly insists. And he’s given extra to soft-spoken contemplation than to punch traces as he drifts via philosophical musings about energy and ethics, about the place he’s from and the place he’s heading.

“Typically I discover myself doing too many issues as a result of I’m identical to, Oh, I’m right here, and I’ve this chance and this entry — I wish to take all of it earlier than I die,” he mentioned, including later: “At what level does the buildup of expertise turn out to be grasping?”

The McElhenney origin story he tells is a hero’s journey constructed within the grand custom of the American dream: An outsider from a working-class Philadelphia household defies the percentages to allure the Hollywood fits and obtain enormous success along with his buddies by his facet.

Rising up in South Philly, McElhenney clung to TV comedies as a supply of escape and connection. When he was 9, his mom moved out to be with the girl who’s now his stepmother, and he and his two youthful siblings sought stability in NBC’s Thursday evening lineup, religiously watching “The Cosby Present” and “Household Ties” with their father. Throughout weekends at their mothers’ home, it was “Golden Women.”

Appearing was initially a final resort. Small and never athletic however longing deeply for connection, the teenage McElhenney finally deserted his makes an attempt to play a sport at his all-boys Catholic highschool and answered the siren tune of a close-by sister faculty, which wanted boys for its manufacturing of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” After a short stint at Temple College, he moved to New York and finally Los Angeles to pursue performing.

The thought for one in every of TV’s most profitable comedies was born modestly sufficient, coming to McElhenney in the midst of the evening in 2004, two years after he moved to Los Angeles. He envisaged a scene through which a man knocks on his buddy’s door to ask for some sugar for his espresso. The buddy tells him he has most cancers. The primary man is de facto sorry to listen to that — however he nonetheless wants the sugar.

As McElhenney put it, if the “maxim” of “Buddies” was “I’ll be there for you,” then the one for “Sunny” could be “I’ll by no means be there.”

Whereas residing in a transformed West Hollywood storage and dealing as a waiter, McElhenney approached his fellow aspiring actors Day, Glenn Howerton and Jordan Reid (then McElhenney’s girlfriend) with a script, they usually shot the unique pilot for “Sunny” on a hand-held camcorder. They shopped it round and, in keeping with McElhenney, the fledgling FX supplied the very best likelihood for the group to retain artistic management and to do the low-budget present their means.

“It was completely, one hundred pc not what I used to be searching for,” John Landgraf, who was then president of leisure at FX, mentioned as he emphasised McElhenney’s complete lack of expertise as a author, producer or showrunner. “However it was humorous. He had a voice.”

FX paid them to shoot a extra polished pilot and prompt it may need a greater likelihood of standing out in the event that they modified the characters from a bunch of self-involved actors in Los Angeles to a bunch of self-involved bar house owners in McElhenney’s native Philadelphia.

As McElhenney, Howerton and Day waited to listen to if the present could be picked up, FX got here again with a query: Would they be prepared to rent a special actress for the only feminine lead, Candy Dee, who served initially as a moralizing foil?

The blokes agreed to seek out another person, and Reid, who by then had cut up with McElhenney, was bumped, an expertise she described in a 2016 essay for Observer as feeling like a betrayal by her pals. (Reid not begrudges the boys for seizing their alternative, she wrote in an e mail, and he or she and McElhenney every now say that they’re as soon as once more pals. FX declined to touch upon the casting situation.)

Olson auditioned and gained the half, which was then reworked to match the debauchery of the male characters.

“Rob really apologized to me that they didn’t do this already,” Olson mentioned. “He undoubtedly had a vested curiosity in making this character equal to the male characters, and it was very refreshing on the time.”

Sixteen years after its debut, “Sunny” stays resolutely dedicated to its model of crass nihilism in an age of kinder, gentler comedies like “Ted Lasso” and “Schitt’s Creek.” However whereas “Sunny” stays intent on “satirizing ignorance,” as McElhenney put it, he additionally admits there have been missteps, just like the therapy of a recurring transgender character, who was known as a slur in a means that made it appear as if the present, slightly than the characters, was advocating her mistreatment.

“We are able to’t retroactively change issues,” he mentioned. “What we’ve finished is modify for them.”

For instance, McElhenney’s character, Mac, went on a rocky coming out journey throughout Seasons 11 to 13 that then culminated in a tonal shift as he carried out a poignant, four-and-a-half-minute interpretive dance after revealing his sexuality to his imprisoned father.

After which there was the blackface. Within the wake of final yr’s nationwide racial justice protests, Hulu, which streams “Sunny” in the USA, eliminated a number of episodes that depict characters, together with McElhenney’s, in blackface. Slightly than let the episodes disappear from collective reminiscence, nonetheless, the “Sunny” group confronted them in a Season 15 episode that dives into problems with cancel tradition, atonement and white saviorism because the characters movie their newest sequel to the “Deadly Weapon” franchise.

This time, nonetheless, there are Black actors as a substitute of blackface — together with Geoffrey Owens, finest identified for enjoying Elvin on “The Cosby Present,” who had appeared in earlier episodes and in “Mythic Quest.” The brand new episode additionally has a Black director (Pete Chatmon) and Black co-writer (Keyonna Taylor).

Over the previous couple of years, public discourse and their very own evolving considering satisfied McElhenney and the remainder of the artistic group that they need to diversify the present’s views, although it was initially unclear how that might serve their bigoted foremost characters.

“At its basis, it’s a present about 5 ignorant, white individuals, proper?” McElhenney mentioned. “So, at first we thought, properly, how does it even make sense to have completely different factors of view in there?”

“Then we had been like, Oh my God, after all,” he added. “Who may higher perceive the way it feels to be within the wake of ignorant white individuals than individuals who aren’t ignorant white individuals? Ignorant white males, particularly.”

Ladies and folks of colour have more and more been added to the “Sunny” fold, a course McElhenney continued when staffing and casting “Mythic Quest,” which was lately renewed for a 3rd and fourth season. A office comedy set at a online game firm, it stars McElhenney as an egomaniacal recreation creator reverse Charlotte Nicdao, a Filipina-Australian actress in her first main Hollywood function.

Past McElhenney’s diversification efforts, Nicdao and Ganz mentioned, he has additionally labored exhausting to supply steerage and alternatives for individuals who maybe didn’t have as away from a path ahead within the trade as he did.

“As a lady, I’ve all the time felt uncomfortable asking anybody to take day trip of what they’re doing to show me one thing,” Nicdao mentioned. “The factor that Rob has finished is create this surroundings the place I’ve by no means needed to ask.”

“I’ve, for the primary time, thought-about, oh, perhaps I wish to produce,” she added. “Perhaps I wish to direct. Perhaps I might really be able to that.”

Likewise, Ganz, who met McElhenney when she joined “Sunny” as a author and co-producer in 2016, mentioned it was McElhenney who pushed her to make her directorial debut, within the second season of “Mythic Quest.”

“Rob’s like a supportive bully, in that he encourages you very aggressively to step exterior of your consolation zone,” she mentioned. “He believes in you perhaps a couple of toes additional than you consider in your self.”

His perception in others overflows from the abundance of confidence he has lengthy had in himself and in his concepts. And that self-confidence is infectious. Just a few years in the past, the actor Ryan Reynolds slid into McElhenney’s DMs. He was a fan of “Sunny,” they usually developed an internet friendship robust sufficient for McElhenney to ask Reynolds if he wished to affix him in buying a Welsh soccer club known as Wrexham and make a documentary collection concerning the expertise. This was earlier than they’d even met in particular person.

Reynolds mentioned sure, they usually’re at the moment taking pictures “Welcome to Wrexham,” for FX. It’s a few an underdog soccer group but in addition about “group and what we inherit and what we go away behind,” McElhenney mentioned — the kind of big-picture questions he usually finds himself pondering within the hours between his 5 a.m. get up time and his present nightly routine of ingesting a big Manhattan and rewatching “Succession.”

As earnest as McElhenney is concerning the beneficiant facet of his second act — utilizing his personal success to create safety and alternative for others — he’s conscious that he’s partly motivated by self-interest. By elevating new expertise round him, he’s making his personal tasks higher. It additionally makes him really feel good.

“Am I doing all of it within the service of one thing constructive or good? I’d prefer to say that the reply is sure,” he mentioned. “However generally, if I’m being sincere with myself, perhaps it’s simply that I don’t know what it’s I’m searching for. Perhaps once I discover it, I’ll know.”