It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Review

The premise is simple and the discipline around it is not. Five people run a bar badly, and the show has never allowed any of them a redemptive beat, a lesson, or a moment of earned sympathy that survives into the next episode. Twenty seasons of that consistency is genuinely rare, because every long running comedy eventually tries to make you like someone. The dialogue is where the craft lives, a specific overlapping cadence of interruption and escalating nonsense that the cast writes for itself and delivers faster than most sitcoms would attempt.

The Nightman Cometh, The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell and the flat out formal experiment of the suburbs bottle episode show a room willing to break its own format the moment it gets bored. Danny DeVito's arrival in the second season changed what the show was allowed to be. It is shot like nothing at all, a cheap bar and a handheld camera, and the plotting is often thin. The voices carry it, and they have carried it a very long way.