It’s Been 6 Years, Time To Return The Banned Always Sunny Episodes To Streaming

By TeeJay Small
| Published 31 seconds ago

Back in 2020, the United States was going through a series of dramatic once-in-a-lifetime events all at the same time. The global pandemic had us confined to our homes, binge-watching our favorite sitcoms. The tumultuous election cycle had us wondering if we’d ever see civility in our government again. And a series of viral police brutality encounters engaged a large-scale discussion about the nature of race and policing that spilled over into nationwide protests. While all this was going on, a handful of obnoxious caucasian executives decided they needed to be the center of attention for five minutes, so they banned a handful of TV episodes from streaming.

Several prominent TV series were struck with the ban-hammer over a few weeks in Summer 2020, including five episodes of FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The episodes in question featured a variety of characters donning dark makeup to perform black or brown-skinned caricatures. Whether it’s Dee Reynolds performing her Hispanic character Martina Martinez, or Mac’s ill-advised portrayal of Lethal Weapon‘s Roger Murtaugh, each instance of blackface has been scrubbed from the show.

This Is Not An Argument In Favor Of Blackface

Just to be clear, I don’t think any civilized person is arguing in favor of blackface. As a society, we have effectively all reached an agreement that white actors performing in minstrel makeup to mock or denigrate black people is weird, wrong, and patently unacceptable.

In fact, nobody makes that argument clearer than the cast and crew of Always Sunny, since that was literally the entire point of the now-banned episodes. Each instance of blackface in the show is met with shock and disgust from the rest of the gang, as part of a demonstration of how doing blackface is wrong.

It’s OK To Portray Flawed People Being Flawed

Banning these episodes, to me, scans like banning Star Wars because Darth Vader murders people. Killing people is precisely what establishes him as a villain that we’re supposed to root against.

If you can’t portray a flawed character doing something awful without audiences seeing it as some kind of endorsement, we may as well ban every movie, TV show, and video game that’s ever been made. What’s next? Should we ban every war documentary that makes a passing reference to the atrocities of the Nazis?

No One Was Offended By It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Blackface Episodes

Normally, I’m not one to argue about things like this, because I’m not impacted by the material. But in this case, it seems clear that nobody was offended by these It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes in the first place. Absolutely nobody was talking about the show during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations during the Summer of 2020, and I’ve never encountered somebody who felt offended by these episodes and agreed with them being pulled.

From my perspective, it seems like the execs at Fox turned on their TVs and watched as protestors stormed the streets seeking police accountability. Then, realizing that they had absolutely nothing to contribute to that conversation, they searched for something inconsequential that might put their company in headlines. They pulled the episodes at the request of nobody at all, patted themselves on the back, and acted like they made some kind of grand gesture, probably while fraternizing with politicians in a Scrooge McDuck-style pool of gold coins.

What We’ve Lost

It’s been six years since the episodes were pulled, and I think it’s past time to put them back on streaming. Some of the episodes, such as “The Gang Recycles Their Trash” and “America’s Next Top Paddy’s Billboard Model Contest,” are foundational to the Always Sunny in Philadelphia catalog. Plus, new viewers are missing out on Paul Walter Hauser‘s hilarious cameo appearance as a young juggalo in “Dee Reynolds: Shaping America’s Youth.”

Hulu doesn’t need to make any major announcements about the episodes. Nobody has to come forward and admit they were wrong for virtue-signaling and attention-seeking by pulling the episodes in the first place. Just quietly reupload the banned episodes, and we can all move on with our lives. They’ve already done this for the single banned Community episode, which was pulled around the same time, and miraculously, nobody batted an eye.