For decades, the record for the longest-running live-action sitcom of all time was held by The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, an aggressively wholesome sitcom that debuted in the early Fifties and starred a real-life family playing idealized versions of themselves.
That record was finally broken a few years back by Always Sunny, a grubby, uncouth, deceptively brilliant comedy that is such a stylistic and philosophical departure from Ozzie & Harriet in every way that the Nelson family would likely all faint at the sight of it. Sunny stars Rob McElhenney (who also created it), Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, and Kaitlin Olson as four self-involved idiots who keep colliding with hot-button topics in the news, with financing and interference from Danny DeVito as Howerton and Olson’s grotesque father. Where most classic sitcoms are gasping for air by the time they hit their third or fourth season, Sunny has proved so improbably durable that it wouldn’t be a shock to eventually get to an episode called “The Gang Is Eligible to Join AARP.”
By Alan Sipenwall, Rolling Stone Magazine
