'It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia' Season 17: All The Info

It’s always busy for the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia cast.

Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton are in movies; Rob McElhenney is buying soccer teams with Ryan Reynolds and working on Mythic Quest; Kaitlin Olson is roasting Jean Smart and starring in her own just-renewed TV show; and Danny DeVito is doing whatever Danny DeVito does all day. Probably eating free subs from Jersey Mike’s. Does that leave any time for more It’s Always Sunny?

It turns out: yes! It’s Always Sunny is returning to FX (and Hulu) for season 17. Here’s everything we know.

Plot

Danny DeVito (jokingly) thinks the first 16 seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia were “very tame.” Now, in season 17, “we can ruffle a few feathers, rattle a few cages, you know, shoot some fireworks.” That includes a joke that Standards & Practices had an issue with (I hate to side with the censors, but…) and part two of the show’s crossover with Abbott Elementary.

In the Abbott Elementary season 4 midseason premiere, “Volunteers,” Charlie, Dennis, Mac, Dee, and Frank are forced to do community service at the Philadelphia-based school. The Abbott cast will return the favor by “jumping into our world” in It’s Always Sunny season 17, Kaitlin Olson told Variety. “It’s been really fun for both of our casts to be able to do.”

Abbott Elementary producer Patrick Schumacker said that the “viewing experience” of the crossover is “watching these two episodes back to back, even though I don’t know if they’ve even solidified their date yet, but eventually, they’re going to end up on Hulu together and it’ll be very easy to access both of them back to back. They do very much play off of each other.”

Except the It’s Always Sunny episode will have a lot more Dennis.

“Glenn [Howerton] had a show that he is a series regular on called Sirens,” Schumacker said about Dennis’ camera-shy absence from the Abbott part of the crossover. “It’s the Netflix show, and it was shooting in New York. He flew in specifically to work on this and had to fly back. We had him for half a day, so we had to build that in. That was one of those ones where we didn’t know if we had him, and so, we had to stay a little bit nimble as far as breaking the story. But he’s very heavy in their episode.”

As for the rest of It’s Always Sunny season 17, no other plot details have been shared, although filming did finish in December.

Cast

Like U2, the It’s Always Sunny gang is still together after all these years: Rob McElhenney (Mac), Charlie Day (Charlie), Glenn Howerton (Dennis), Kaitlin Olson (Dee), and Danny DeVito (Frank). The other degenerates in the extended It’s Always Sunny universe who could return in season 17 include Mary Elizabeth Ellis as The Waitress, David Hornsby as Rickety Cricket, Artemis Pebdani as Artemis, Lynne Marie Stewart as Charlie’s mom, Sandy Martin as Mac’s mom, and Jimmi Simpson and Nate Mooney as the McPoyles.