The It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Moment That Defined Frank For Danny DeVito
When one returns to season 2 of "Always Sunny" after watching the later seasons, it's clear that early seasons Frank is not quite the Frank we've come to know and love. He's still a menace, of course, but he's not quite as much of a grimy, amoral agent of chaos as he is today. Season 2 Frank still dresses reasonably well, makes attempts to be a father figure to Dennis and Dee, and has a decent handle on reality. By season 16, Frank is evicting his daughter for a quick buck, peeing on fire hydrants like a dog, and using anal beads to drunkenly con his way through a chess tournament. This level of depravity wasn't built in a day.
When Danny DeVito was asked about Frank's character regression on the Always Sunny podcast, he explained how the character's decline was set up in his first very first episode on the show. From the moment Frank asked Charlie to let him move into his apartment, Frank's character arc was set in stone. "I describe it to [Charlie] in that scene where I say I want to live in squalor," DeVito said. "And so I felt that the direction that Frank was going was more and more extreme. And I always used to say to you, 'Push the envelope, let's do more outrageous things.'"
The actual words Frank says to Charlie in that scene are, "I used to live like this in squalor and filth, always trying to get over on people, scamming my way through situations ... I wanna live like you again, Charlie. I wanna be pathetic and desperate and ugly and hopeless." Nearly seventeen years later, we can safely say Frank's gotten his wish.
When Frank became Frank
Danny DeVito influenced Frank's increasingly ridiculous characterization, believing that "pushing the envelope" was the funniest possible direction for the character. "I love when you throw me out of a window," he explained on the podcast. "I love when I lose my memory. I love when I get, you know, caught in a coil. A port-a-potty or a coil in my underwear. Or slimed ... If you look at the milestones of it, you can say, you know, when this happened to me and when that happened to me and when blah, blah, blah. You know, all the way down the line as a throughline for Frank's character."
For Charlie Day, the period where Frank truly became Frank was "around the third or fourth season," although he couldn't quite pinpoint a specific moment. Fans themselves have had their own debates over this: Was it when Frank indirectly killed a guy via Russian Roulette in season 2? Was it in season 3's "The Gang Gets Whacked" when Frank casually pimps out his son Dennis at a country club? Or was it in season 4's "The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis" when he decides to waterboard his own daughter in the bathroom of Paddy's Pub? I'd argue that Frank hadn't fully become Frank until "A Very Sunny Christmas," the season 5 episode where naked sweaty Frank burst out of a couch in the middle of a crowded office party.
"I think that's probably the most referenced — one of the most referenced moments of the show, period," Rob McElhenny said about it, and everyone else on the podcast seemed to agree. "That was hysterical," DeVito said. It was everything people have come to associate with Frank: unexpected, obscene, and done with total commitment to the bit.
How far will things go?
Since the couch scene, Frank has gone on to shoot his handgun into crowds while high on LSD, burn down a whole apartment complex and trapping other tenants inside, and confess to running sweatshops in Vietnam and putting the dead workers into soup. Even when he's not doing anything strictly immoral, he's still embraced the squalor lifestyle to a level that's shocking. He's plummeted to the point where in season 16's "Frank Shoots Everyone in the Gang," Frank thinks Dee and Dennis are going to kill him, and he just goes along with it. "You can float me out into the ocean and let the sharks eat me," he says, resigned. "Or you can leave me on the ground, gruesome for the kids to see."
The whole thing's played for laughs, especially with the reveal that the seemingly-deserted beach they're on is actually filled with people just fifteen feet away. But after a few seasons where the show's given us some surprisingly sincere, poignant moments for other members of the gang, this does raise the question of whether Frank's ever going to get his own serious moment. Charlie got his breakdown in the rain in season 15, and Mac got his absurdly well-choreographed dance number in season 13; will Danny DeVito ever get the chance to use his emotional acting chops with Frank, or will the character continue even further down this filthy, cartoonish path? Considering how funny and surprising this latest season was, it honestly feels like the show could go either way.