'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' celebrates 10 years of laughing at terrible people

Ten years ago last week, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia served notice it was going to be a very funny show about very terrible people.

The audience was not yet large when the show established that premise, in the first episode, "The Gang Gets Racist," which premiered on Aug. 4, 2005, on FX.

Last year, however, with a two-season renewal, It's Always Sunny became the longest-running live-action comedy on cable. It's tied for second of all time with My Three Sons. (Sunny's 11th season will premiere next year on FX's sister channel, FXX.)

The longest-running sitcom? The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a show about the kindest, nicest, and most milquetoast.

Ozzie and Harriet would never become anti-abortion protesters to sleep with women. Or destroy the life of a priest for fun. Or smoke crack to get on welfare. Or wear blackface to continue the Lethal Weapon franchise.

Yet these are some of our fondest memories from It's Always Sunny - because it's a show about scum treating other people like scum. And to our great pleasure, we revel in their awfulness.

The show began as a concept from St. Joe's Prep grad Rob McElhenney and his buddy Glenn Howerton, as It's Always Sunny on TV. To differentiate it from other sitcoms, it was moved to its Philadelphia setting. The show is set largely in a neighborhood bar that feels familiar. It could be Oscar's on Sansom Street, the Nut Hut in Fishtown, or McCusker's in South Philly. Instead, it's populated by five of garbage people - Mac (McElhenney), Dennis (Howerton), Charlie (the brilliant Charlie Day), Dee (McElhenney's wife and gifted physical comedian, Kaitlin Olson), and Frank (Danny DeVito, who found out about the show from his kids and joined in the second season).

It's Always Sunny's greatest triumph in its 10-year run - other than perhaps the image of DeVito rising naked from a leather couch - is to enforce the idea that you can still like a comedy even if by rights you should hate its leads.

But should hate and do hate are different things.

There have been dark comedies on TV for years - M*A*S*H's theme song alone would not be Ozzie and Harriet-appropriate, but the M*A*S*H guys were war heroes. They ultimately were good people.

Other shows have certainly toyed with creating casts of characters who will never be up for sainthood. Seinfeld is It's Always Sunny's closest relative in that regard, a show that culminated in that gang's literal imprisonment for refusing to be good people. But they weren't universally bad, either. Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and especially George were prickly and picky. George was the worst of all - this is the guy who shrugged off the wedding-invitation-induced death of his fiancée - but his unpleasantness was couched largely in the mundane world of big salads and double-dipping.

Those mundanities also rankled George's inspiration, Larry David, who brought his own brand of terribleness to HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show that went even further than his brainchild Seinfeld. Larry is a guy constantly putting himself in situations where his own awfulness is on display, a guy whose friends don't even like him that much, yet he's watchable not in spite of these facts but because of them.

Putting a thoroughly repellent person - or people, in the case of It's Always Sunny - in the lead of a show doesn't ensure success. It's quite difficult to make that formula work.If an audience doesn't at least connect with a comedic lead, why would they want to watch him/her/them?

What makes shows like It's Always Sunny, and by extension Seinfeld and Curb, work is this overarching fact: These characters may be gross, but they're also all losers. They never get to win; they never get to come out on top. They might bring others down in their wake - poor Rickety Cricket, poor Waitress - but in the end they themselves are still exactly where they were when they started. No place. George will never get credit for the big salad without getting humiliated first.

In HBO's Eastbound & Down, the racist, narcissistic, hard-partying former baseball player Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) gets close to redemption every once in a while, but he continually screws up his own chances. He wouldn't be Kenny if he didn't. Although the series ended with a possibly happy ending for Kenny, the preceding four seasons allowed us to accept him exactly because he's a loser who loses by his own ineptitude. There was even a sort of reverse charm in his well-maintained delusion of personal greatness.

Like Seinfeld, It's Always Sunny paved the way for other shows featuring a cast of terrible people. The best of them is FX's You're the Worst, an oddly sweet romantic comedy featuring two people whose meet-cute occurs while they are stealing wedding gifts from the nuptials of a woman they both hate. (The second season premieres Sept. 9 on FXX; the first season begins streaming on Hulu on Monday.)

Self-pitying Jimmy (Chris Geere) and cynical, barbed Gretchen (Aya Cash) are so anti-love - and really anti-other people - that each tries equally hard to sabotage their budding relationship, relenting only when it just refuses to die. Geere and Cash are fantastic. In their ability to display complexities of viciousness, selfishness, collusion, squalid self-loathing, abysmal immorality, and grasping venality, they approach the level of comic talent seen in the cast of It's Always Sunny itself. And the writing is acidly funny. But You're the Worst works mainly in the end because if Jimmy and Gretchen are together, it means they won't be able to torture anyone else.

Like You're the Worst, the characters in the aptly named Difficult People - it premiered on Hulu on Wednesday - are fully aware they aren't nice. Written by the hilarious Julie Klausner and starring Klausner and Billy Eichner (Billy on the Street), Difficult People is about two best friends who spend most of their time looking at everything else with disgust. "Our lives are garbage and it's the world's fault," Billy says to Julie.

Billy and Julie work as leads because they are the butt of the joke, just like the gang in It's Always Sunny. It's their own actions that keep them down, whether they recognize that or not.

What separates It's Always Sunny from other shows featuring those who are, to borrow a phrase, the worst, and has kept it going for 10 horribly inappropriate years is that it's strangely hopeful. In the face of all of the gang's losses, mess-ups, and humiliations, they still keep trying to win, instead of trying to be better. In the process, they generally show how bad they are, and how much worse they have become. In that, they always succeed.

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@mollyeichel